MIT license as default for CSL software

CSL Development
1

Hi all,

While all our styles and locale files, and most of our documentation
is released under CC BY-SA, we never selected a license for our CSL
software. While our software mostly consists of scripts that are used
within the project, I still think it’s a good idea to choose a
permissive license.

Dan Stillman just agreed to license
https://github.com/citation-style-language/distribution-updater/ under
the MIT license. Carles Pina, Charles Parnot, Sebastian Karcher and I
agreed to license code we contributed to the CSL project (i.e., code
contributed at https://github.com/citation-style-language) under the
MIT license as well.

Unless anybody requests otherwise, I think that this suffices to add
the MIT license to the “utilities”, “distribution-updater”, and
“csl-validator” repos. And I think it makes sense to use this license
as the default for new code.

Thanks to Philipp Zumstein for starting this discussion:

Rintze

2

Excellent!

3

As a follow-up on this, we just got a request to clarify the license
for the CSL schema. It currently says “Permission to freely use, copy
and distribute.”, which doesn’t discuss modification. This raised some
red flags with the Debian packagers:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=775532

Bruce agreed with my suggestion to relicense the schema under the MIT
license. So unless anybody objects to this or wishes to suggest a
different license, we’ll go with that.

Rintze

4

I agree to license my contributions to the schema under the MIT license.

Simon