It's easy to get wrapped up in the creation of your projects, but if you're sharing them with others it's important to tell them what they can do with your content. We encourage each project to include a license to make that clear, and we've made it incredibly easy to add one. The hard part is deciding which license to use.
There are a number of existing licenses available:
Kumu projects are unique in the sense that they include general content (map descriptions, presentations, etc), data (fields, metrics, etc), and code (views). Most existing open source licenses only cover a single type of content. Creative Commons licenses are the most comprehensive, but they also carry legal burdens we aren't comfortable with for most of our projects. After reviewing existing options, we ended up developing our own license we call The Kokua License.
The license you use is up to you, but we hope many of you choose to share your projects generously with the community.
Remember, by giving others access to your project on Kumu you agree to let them fork the project. This does not grant any rights beyond creating the initial fork, so it's important to tell people what they can do with the content.
The Kokua License
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
Permission is hereby granted to freely exploit this content in any way
by anyone for any purpose, without warranty of any kind. Attribution is
appreciated, but not required.
Kokua is a Hawaiian word, that translates into “extending help to others for their own benefit, without expectation for personal gain.”
The CC BY 2.0 license is one of the most permissive Creative Commons licenses. Even it requires derived works to include attribution in the form of:
the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material.
And if you make any changes you must:
indicate if you modified the material and retain an indication of previous modifications