relicensing effort tracking issue

[olafklingt]

Moving tutorials out of the reference manuals requires relicensing them from nixpkgs' MIT to this repo's CC-BY-SA.

This needs agreement by all authors of the materials in question.

Here are collections of articles we may want to extract and add to nix.dev:

• Reorganise the Package Management chapter nix#7769
• Nixpkgs manual? (TODO)
• NixOS manual? (TODO)
• guide/checklist for finding authors

Here is a list of similar efforts in the past:

TODO @asymmetric

[fricklerhandwerk]

An alternative is to note the license per article in case it doesn't match. This would make a lot of things easier, especially for Nixpkgs and NixOS manuals, which have a lot of authors.

@domenkozar does anything speak against that?

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2023-03-21-documentation-team-meeting-notes-34/26619/1

[domenkozar]

I think ideally we'd re-license to make things easier. Hopefully CC-BY-SA is not controversial :)

[fricklerhandwerk]

Discussed in the Nix documentation team meeting:

Suggestion by @infinisil: when moving a piece of documentation in to the CC realm, ping all the authors and wait for their public approval to relicense.

We need instructions/guidance how to get author information so it's not too much friction for those who attempt the migration.

@asymmetric: We don't have to be blocked on relicesing if we import under the existing license. Can change the license later down the road.

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2023-04-11-documentation-team-meeting-notes-40/27261/1

[asymmetric]

We can also prepend each non-CC file with its MIT license, in a comment. It's very short.

[asymmetric]

For me this is blocked by nix.dev becoming official, both in theory and in practice (i.e. looks, content)

[hugosenari]

If migrating content, with permission we still have to track contributors by content, what is the value of license migration?

I mean, options:

1. We have a footnote with all contributors + the effort to make them accept the new license,
2. We have a footnote with all contributors + old license.