locales files licensing

CSL Development
1

Quickly,

There’s been some confusion about licensing of locales files, and so
we really need to figure this out.

Rintze found this note on how Launchpad (and by extension Ubuntu)
deals with licensing of their locales files.

https://help.launchpad.net/Translations/LicensingFAQ

They require BSD, based on the logic that:

"Why was this needed?
Translations are freely shared between projects on Launchpad.
Copyright complicates that free exchange. That’s why our terms of use
require that, when you translate in Launchpad, you grant us the right
to share those translations with other projects.

Why the BSD license?
The BSD license is universally compatible. This lets you share and
combine with projects under GPL, LGPL, BSD, and many other licenses."

It seems to me we have the same requirements (and this also might
apply to styles?). Should we adopt the same license and policy?

If yes, what do we need to do towards that end?

Bruce

2

As a bit of background, CSL locale files used to be translated via
http://www.babelzilla.org/ along with the Zotero UI. BabelZilla doesn’t
really offer any information about licensing. I don’t have contact
information for most of the BabelZilla translators, so it would be difficult
and impractical to ask everybody for permission, so I hope we could use a
"we’ll move to this license unless anybody objects"-approach. CSL locale
files are now hosted in their own repository
https://github.com/citation-style-language/locales .

I don’t really have an opinion whether moving from CC-BY-SA to BSD would
make sense for CSL styles.

Rintze