[Notion-general] LICENSE file in contrib

[Philipp H. <ph...@ph...>]

Hi,

the LICENSE file in contrib seems to have been created when importing the 
script collection into [1], compare for example [2] which does not have such a 
file.

The LICENSE file states that scripts without explicit license header are under 
the GPL3. The Debian copyright file of the ion3-scripts package[3] however 
indicates that those scripts are in the public domain instead. 

Of course one can take public domain code and put it under the GPL3, but would 
we want to do this? My opinion is that in particular for small
things like most scripts, the less we have to worry about any license 
questions, the better. And at the very least this default license should be 
compatible with the Notion license, so that we can take script logic and use 
it internally, if we ever think that would be worthwhile.

So my suggestion would be to drop the LICENSE file, provided the people who 
contributed to [1] since the import of [2] agree. 

This seem to be Arnout, Etan and Juri (and Voker57, who explicitly put his 
work in the public domain). What do you think?

I would then also think about adding explicit public domain notices to the 
header of those scripts that don't have any copyright notice.

If the public domain seems like a bad concept, we could alternatively choose 
some very permissive open source license as the default license. The MIT 
license[4] comes to mind. We probably would need to add copyright notices, say 
for "The Notion Team", to the script headers.
 
Other suggestions?

Cheers,
Philipp

[1] https://github.com/jhamb/NotionScriptsCollection
[2] http://archlinux-stuff.googlecode.com/files/ion-3-scripts.tar.bz2
[3] http://snapshot.debian.org/package/ion3-scripts/20070515.debian-1/
[4] http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php