Licensing Your Course

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ATTENTION!

This documentation is deprecated. For the latest version of the swirlify documentation please visit: http://swirlstats.com/swirlify

All of the projects that Team swirl works on are open source, and we encourage swirl course authors to make their courses open source. This document is not legal advice and we are not lawyers or or legal scholars. These are just our opinions as software developers and statisticians.

A swirl course is comprised of three licensable entities:

1. Content: written mostly in lesson.yaml, this is the prose (or perhaps poetry) that a student sees in their console.
2. Code: any custom answer tests, any R scripts, or even code written in other languages that a course author may have written that is included in the course.
3. Data: any datasets included in the course.

We recommend including a LICENCE.txt file inside of the course directory before you distribute your course. This file should explicitly state licensing information for the content, code, and data included in the course.

Explicitly Retaining Your Copyright

When you create a swirl course you own the copyright to the code and the content. If you wish to reserve all rights to your course we recommend the following LICENCE.txt file:

All code and content contained within this course is
Copyright [Year] [Course Author]. All rights reserved.

This will indicate your choice to retain the copyright for your content and code. Copyright does not apply to datasets in the United States though copyright for data does apply in other countries. Make sure you know your country's laws before distributing data with your courses.

Open Source Licensing Options

Content

In our opinion the best way to license the content of your course is by using one of the Creative Commons licenses. All content in courses made by Team swirl use the CC BY 4.0 license.

Code

There is a wonderful ecosystem of open source software licenses which you are welcome to explore.

All of the code produced by Team swirl uses the MIT license. You can use any software license under the sun for code you include in your swirl course, however we recommend the following three licenses:

• MIT
• GPL-3
• CC0

The CC0 license is a Creative Commons license that dedicates your code to the public domain. You can also use CC0 for your content.

Data

As we said before copyright does not apply to datasets in the United States, however it does apply in other countries. In order to be sure your data is open source we recommend using the CC0 license for datasets you distribute with your course.

Example LICENCE.txt Files

The following license is included in all courses created by Team swirl:

Copyright 2015 Team swirl

The content of this course including but not limited to contents of the
lesson.yaml files enclosed are licensed CC BY 4.0. For more information please
visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The datasets contained in this course are dedicated to the public domain under
the CC0 license. For more information please visit 
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

The software contained in this course is subject to the following license:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of 
this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in 
the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to 
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies 
of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do 
so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all 
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR 
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, 
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL TEAM
SWIRL BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN 
ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION 
WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Except as contained in this notice, the name of Team swirl shall not be 
used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in 
this Software without prior written authorization from Team swirl.