bitcoin-dev
BIP 2 revival and rework
Posted on: October 15, 2016 11:00 UTC
On October 15, 2016, a discussion took place on the Bitcoin development mailing list regarding the best-suited license for Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs).
Marco Falke suggested that BIPs should be licensed under a public domain license such as CC0 with a CC-BY option. Falke argued that using code-specific licenses for documentation and specification is not appropriate. He also stated that more restrictive licenses such as CC-BY-SA are not suitable for BIPs and that the BIP repository is not the right place to promote open access. However, Tom disagreed with Falke's suggestion of dual-licensing BIPs under CC0 and CC-BY and instead suggested that "Share alike" is required while "Attribution" is optional. Falke responded by stating that there is no CC license that requires Share Alike and has Attribution as an option. He added that if authors are concerned about getting proper attribution, they can choose MIT/BSD or CC-BY. He also noted that BIP 2 allows such licenses but does not recommend them. Despite this, some parts of BIP 2 appeared to conflict with these views and suggested that public domain is not universally recognized as a legitimate action. Tom raised concerns about the lack of clarity around proposed changes to licensing and suggested that people make clear any and all changes that are proposed and defend each of them with reasons why they want to change things. He also pointed out that lawyers disagreeing on the issue could look fishy and added links to his blog and vlog. The discussion ended with Falke suggesting to move forward with BIP 2 in the next couple of days/weeks if there were no objections.