[Expo-tech] expo - new page "How can I contribute?" & OS license & TM

[Philip Sargent [Gmail]]

We are always muttering that we wish that more people would help with
tunnelling surveys or fixing  - or even just reporting - bugs. But until now
we have no obvious entry point for someone who wants to help.

So I have copied some open source projects and produced our own version of a
"How can I contribute?" page:
http://expo.survex.com/handbook/computing/contribute.html
and put links to it on the Main page and the Handbook index.

Please comment or correct it, or add things... especially to the survey data
to-do  jobs in 
http://expo.survex.com/handbook/computing/todo-data.html 



Open Source License
-------------------------
I see that we have no explicit open source license for our code (oops).

The cave descriptions XML files are presumably intended to be covered by
AERW's statement about CC BY-SA http://expo.survex.com/copyit.htm   but I
think his wording is inadequately precise today and we need something much
more definite. He has given every individual the copyright of their own
contributions which would be a nightmare to manage.

I have made a guess that we probably want to use the MIT license for our
code rather than the CC BY-SA license chosen by AERW for the HTML content.
Though it is interesting that Django itself uses CC BY-SA 3.0.

Notable projects that use the MIT License include the X Window System, Ruby
on Rails, Node.js, Lua and JQuery.
The Apache license would be another option. 
Wookey has mentioned that we don't want to make life hard for other caving
organisations who might want to use troggle. This means we should use a
"compatible relicensable license"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility  .

As of 2020, the MIT license was used in 27% of 4 million open source
packages. 

If people feel strongly about this I could get my copies of O'Reilly "Open
Source & Free Software Licensing and Rosen's "Open Source Licensing" down
from my bookshelf;  but that would be a job for the winter as I'm flying to
Greece on August 4th (if they don't declare war on Turkey) to work on my
boat for a couple of months. 

Copyright & Trade Mark
----------------------------
I believe that the word "troggle" is not yet a trade mark (through froggle
and proggle are). 
https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmtext 

Unfortunately this is now expensive: £170 and it has to be in the name of a
person or "incorporated body" e.g. the President of the cave club personally
or the senior treasurer, not CUCC. It would be a "word mark"
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/trade-marks-manual/new-applications 

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/process-for-applying-to-register-
for-a-trade-mark
TradeMark is extremely useful as the law is very clear so one would never
need to sue for breach of copyright and it would enable us to prevent any
misrepresentation. I think it is worth £17 a year (£170 for 10 years).

We can't *copyright* the word 'troggle' as individual words can't be
copyright. 
The word  has already been used in a book - which  does give us a nifty
informal logo:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1155986.The_Tricky_Troggle if we could
come to an arrangement with the illustrator.