# Engineering Licensing Guarantees

> **SEE PR FOR WEBSITE LANGUAGE**
>
> this is now encoded in 2i2c's website via the following PR: https://github.com/2i2c-org/2i2c-org.github.io/pull/359

## What is this?

As we work towards a more intentional and structured approach to doing open source contributions, anxieties around what that means for the future of 2i2c as an Open Source organization is natural. The beginnings of the processes that eventually led to various licensing changes and organizations not really being open source anymore (Redis, Hashicorp, Elastic, etc) probably looked superficially similar! To draw the bounds of our change, and to signal both internally and externally that this is *not* us going down a similar path, it is useful to codify some guarantees about the license of the work we will be engineering.

## Who is this for?

There are three audiences:

1. Folks *currently internal* to 2i2c, who may be concerned that we are treading the well worn path to becoming the next Hashicorp, or Mongo, or Elastic, or \[insert another recent bait and switch here\]. This document provides a sense of psychological safety to have bold discussions about structuring our approach to open source.
2. Partners and users of 2i2c, who _need_ to have a better understanding of the guarantees that working with us provides. This is similar to the effect our Right to Replicate has.
3. Future employees of 2i2c, who have clear (and common) expectations of how their work will be licensed.

## What does this document change?

These guarantees are not any change from status quo, but simply codifications of things that are already true. These guarantees are already implicit in our Right to Replicate, and this document makes them explicit. It also hopes to pave the way to a different strategic document around co-production with our communities. As such, this is a *tactial* document rather than something that fundamentally changes our strategy.

## What is the scope of this document?

In line with the scope of our right to replicate, the scope of this document is only towards work produced by the Engineering team, and does not include content produced by us or our communities, documentation about business process, etc. Other parts of the org are welcome to adopt similar documents if desired!

## The guarantees

(Definitions of MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, MAY, etc are defined in [RFC 2119](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119))

1. All engineering artifacts (code, documentation, etc) produced by 2i2c engineering team MUST be licensed under an open source license approved by an external non-profit organization.[^1]
2. Current list of external organizations whose license we accept are[^2]:
a. [the Open Source Initiative](https://opensource.org/)
b. the [Organization for Ethical Source](https://ethicalsource.dev/)).
3. Adding new organizations to (2) MUST be done through a 2/3 majority vote of the entire organization. [^3]
4. Open Source Projects originating at 2i2c, or stewarded by 2i2c, MUST NOT require a [Contributor Licensing Agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement) that includes Copyright Assignment to 2i2c. [^4]

## Possible simplification

We can simplify this by making a choice that licenses are not the way to solve ethical problems in tech, and simply get rid of points 2 and 3. Instead we link only to OSI approved licenses in part 1.

## Footnotes

[^1]: This constrains us from writing proprietary engineering code or creating proprietary products
[^2]: This constrains us from creating a new non profit that rubberstamps a license that is fundamentally proprietary, while still allowing for experimentation with licenses that try to innovate on OSI. This list is also Yuvi's current judgement call.
[^3]: Intentionally difficult, as this is expected to be exceedingly rare.
[^4]: Protects from the most common "bait and switch" licensing problem, where being the sole copyright owner of a project allows us to