Code
The code which makes up themes, in-article scripts, components, etc. is different from the site license, which covers content. Creative Commons best practices are to consider the "code, makeup and back-end" of the site separately from the content for the purposes of licensing, but encourages developers to dual-license their code under Creative Commons as well. That said, Creative Commons recognizes that a site's code is not the same as its content, since you can copy content into a different format separately from the code. I recommend that we follow CC best practices and allow "free and open source" code, which would include:
- BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" license
- BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" or "FreeBSD" license
- GNU General Public License (GPL)
- GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)
- MIT license
- Mozilla Public License 2.0
- Common Development and Distribution License
- Eclipse Public License version 2.0
Allowing these code licenses (some of which are already used on-wiki, such as every Black Highlighter theme) would not impact our site license at all. It would just be clarifying something we already do.
Fonts
We already use open-source fonts for most of our needs. Most font licenses also allow the use of fonts, even ones purchased with commercial licenses, for projects created by the purchaser without additional restrictions. Basically: What we are not allowed to do is distribute the fonts themselves (i.e., the font files), unless the font itself is under a compatible Creative Commons license. We can, however, use them without restriction in most cases.
Note: There are some, rare, exceptions we can handle as they arise. Comic Sans, for example, uses a unique license for its use that conflicts with Creative Commons projects. We cannot therefore use Comic Sans in images or on the site as a whole.
Other licenses
At this time, it's not recommended that any other licenses be allowed to be used on the Wiki; this may be revisited in the future. I also do not recommend allowing any exceptions to our Creative Commons rules except the most exigent circumstances.