benkallos / legislation Goto Github PK

Adding some white space and a .md extension to the proposed legislation would allow them to render as human-readable HTML, rather than as raw text (which is rendered in a monospace font and flows off the edge of the screen).

No substantive changes to the content or formatting would be necessary. In addition to adding a .md extension to each bill, numbered lists would require an extra newline (return), after each list item so as to be properly parsed as markdown.

The project is currently licensed under the AGPL license. There are three reasons this isn't the best license for the project:

First, the AGPL license is a software license. It's intended to facilitate the distribution of software, and as such, has references to things like technical documentation, source code versus binary distributions, static versus dynamic linking, all things which do not apply in this case.

Second, the AGPL is the most restrictive copyleft license in the software world. Not only does it use commercial copyright law to prohibit otherwise valid uses, unlike most other GPL-family licenses, it goes so far as to include use within a service. Excerpting the proposed legislation on a blog or news website can be enough to trigger the copyleft redistribution requirements, and would "poison" the site, requiring the publisher to license their completely unrelated works under the same license (or refuse to quote the proposed legislation).

Finally, as proposed legislation, it's imperative to facilitating a healthy democratic dialog that both supporters and opponents be able to cite the legislation, without stringent attribution or share alike requirements, not to mention, if codified into law, should not be encumbered by commercial copyright restrictions.

Instead, licensing the proposed legislation under a cc0 would be a better fit and would be in line with similiar efforts.

/cc @JoshData, @konklone who may also have strong opinions on the issue.

The project has a readme file, but it doesn't do much to provide context to visitors to the repository. A few common questions to consider answering:

1. What is this? Why does it exist?
2. Why GitHub? What are the goals of putting it here, rather than e.g., a PDF?
3. I have feedback. Should I open an issue? A pull request? (What's the difference between the two?)
4. I have a proposed change. I've never used GitHub before. How do I submit it? Will you accept it?
5. Where can I see ongoing discussions regarding the proposed legislation?
6. Have these bills already passed? Already been proposed? What is the status of the project in relation to the legislative process?
7. Are these documents law? You just merged my pull request, that means I can do X, right?