Add legal section including appropriate attribution

[glennawatson]

Summary

Adds legal attribution page. Includes licenses to all the tools used during the production of the website.

Changes

Additions:

• Add legal attribution notices.

[glennawatson]

Attribution is something I've myself had to be very careful about the past. Have had creators come ask their work be credited in the past. I've scanned the entire repo, including the CSS looking for any custom stuff I can attribute to and included it in this doc.

Happy to change styling or whatever, and also added a area for you guys to include other legal docs in the future.

[mattk04]

Thanks Glenn, appreciate you putting this together for us.

[wsmart17]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention @glennawatson. Just one point of clarification, which I'm hoping you might know a bit more about than me/us. Each of the licences (except CC) mentions something about including a certain piece of text with distributions of the software, so do you think we should be including the content of the licence files on the legal page rather than just a link (or in addition to the link)? I've tried to find some references online to go off of, but everyone seems to have a different opinion on what's needed.

[glennawatson]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention @glennawatson. Just one point of clarification, which I'm hoping you might know a bit more about than me/us. Each of the licences (except CC) mentions something about including a certain piece of text with distributions of the software, so do you think we should be including the content of the licence files on the legal page rather than just a link (or in addition to the link)? I've tried to find some references online to go off of, but everyone seems to have a different opinion on what's needed.

We been having this discussion a lot lately on the board of the .NET foundation board since we have had projects not properly attribute often through not knowing they have to (MIT licenses still require attribution).

We been finding the same issue in terms of resources aren't consistent on recommendations. We wanted to make our own guide for OSS projects but we been warned by legal (Microsoft provides us with limited legal) that unless we pay as a foundation for legal review (we don't have a large amount of cash) we have to be careful offering advice.

The resources we did find:

https://nexb.com/oss-attribution-best-practices/

https://opensource.guide/legal/

The reality is you guys aren't modifying the source code of the projects though so I suspect technically you may not even have to attribute. This is more of a nicety to projects you use and covering your butt document just in case.

I can definitely bring in the individual license text for each project if you want you be super cautious though and leave links as well.

[wsmart17]

The word we're struggling with defining is "distribution" - does having web clients download code and run it count as distribution? Happy to go with the conservative assumption that it does, just to make sure we're doing right by package/resource authors. I think the first link you provide has some good examples, I've looked at the Chrome one just now and it includes the licence text for packages used. So to be safe, might be worth including the text as well as a link? I'm happy to make that change if you'd like, I just don't want to hijack your PR.

As a separate change, to help avoid further cluttering the main menu bar, could we link to this page in the footer instead? The template HTML is in overrides/partials/copyright.html. My thought was that we could have it something like this:

Again, I'm happy to make that change as well if you'd like, just let me know.

[glennawatson]

Yeah. Make the changes as you see fit.

[glennawatson]

@wsmart17 one thing I would recommend when you are changing the PR is adding also material, I acknowledged mkdocs-material but not material itself (transient dependencies are hard). Material being the main theme you guys are using.

https://github.com/material-components/material-web/blob/main/LICENSE

In terms of distribution, I guess you are distributing the 'statically' generated website right. The sub-dependencies are all packages and aren't part of the end product, except maybe the CSS/material.

I think regardless if you take your time and just make a good faith effort that's good enough.

Trick is also to make sure people correctly attribute if they are adding new packages to the project.