Proposal to relicense OWA SWMM from MIT to CC BY 4.0

[michaeltryby]

If you are a contributor or user of this library please consider the implications of relicensing on your work and comment here. Thank you for supporting our project!

[michaeltryby]

Link to CC BY 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

[michaeltryby]

Relicensing from MIT to CC BY 4.0 should work because they are compatible licenses.

[michaeltryby]

Does anyone second this proposal?

[bemcdonnell]

@michaeltryby, I am going to take a deeper look at this today but I am strongly in favor of changing our license after the most recent events. Asserting proper software citation is critical to showing respect to our contributors. This includes compiled and raw code usage, building scripts, and testing code and testing artifacts.

[bemcdonnell]

@michaeltryby, I am assuming a change of license will require reaching out to all the past contributors to get their approval? Or are you suggesting a new license to become effective for new contributions?

[michaeltryby]

@bemcdonnell on one hand, it is always good to communicate with our contributors. On the other hand, given the posts to this issue, there doesn’t seem to be much interest in this topic.

[lrntct]

Please note that CC themselves discourage people from using CC licenses for software:
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software

I am not aware of the events you're mentioning @bemcdonnell, but the current MIT license does not allow anyone to appropriate the work of the developers as if it was one's own. The license requires the copyright notice and the license to be included with the source code.

If you wish to change the license, it would be preferable to choose a commonly used free software license:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
https://opensource.org/licenses