adding a default license to the book

[choldgraf]

This adds a default license to the book that people put in content/. It's using CC BY-SA, and provides some language telling people how to change it if they'd like a different license before publishing their books.

I'll leave this open for a day or so in case people have opinions one way or another! cc @yuvipanda who suggested this happen

[moorepants]

I responded on twitter and ended up here. This project looks very interesting and I'd consider using it. I'd recommend not including a default content license. A prompt in the guide recommending including a license is sufficient. You could even include a blank LICENSE file with instructions on choosing a license. Or maybe a command line flag to choose from a list of license options.

I've yet to see a static site generator that includes a default content license. In fact, most of those tools don't mix the processing source code and the content. A user would create their own repo to house the content and then run a command line tool to process the content. Mixing your software tool with a user's content in the same repo makes it confusing for the user to license things properly. Lastly, if you add this license, is your image of C3PO in master a CC-BY-SA image?

[choldgraf]

@moorepants per some of the discussions on twitter, I'm leaning towards making it easy for people to select a license, rather than making a default license. Thanks for the feedback! Will update this PR as things change

[yuvipanda]

IMO, this is different from a static site generator since it more explicitly is for making books. In such case, 99% of people are not going to pick a license and end up with an 'all rights reserved' book, which I would argue isn't the common intent - this piece of software is focused on publishing books for free on the web. I'd rather set a clearly defined default that we give people the opportunity to change. This is what tools like npm init do, for example.

[choldgraf]

@yuvipanda what I was thinking is to do something like:

• The first time someone runs make book it checks if a LICENSE.md file exists

• If it does not exist, then it sets a prompt like

  We noticed you don't have a license for this book. We recommend the
  CC-BY-SA license, a permissive and open license that requires
  attribution to the original author. Would you like to apply this
  license to your book? (yes)/no
  

• If yes, it creates a LICENSE.md file and adds the CC-BY-SA text into it

• If no, it says "we've created an empty LICENSE.md file in your content/ folder. We recommend that you find a license that suits your needs for this book.

Maybe in the future we can add in the ability for people to choose different licenses, but this seems like a "good enough" solution.

Thoughts?

[yuvipanda]

@choldgraf +1, I like it! Informational & guides people towards the right thing :)

I'd recommend explicitly calling out CC in the 'no' case, since those are much better fits for books than traditional OSS licenses. https://creativecommons.org/choose/ is a reasonable chooser.

[choldgraf]

OK, I think this one is now ready to go. Will leave it for a day or so to give people a chance to comment. Here's what happens:

When people run make book it checks whether content/LICENSE.md exists. If so, do nothing. If not, then:

Prompt the user to add a CC-BY-SA license. If yes, add that license text to a new file at content/LICENSE.md. If no, then add an empty content/LICENSE.md file and suggest the user go to the CC-BY website to find a license that works for them.