The purpose of this project is to develop a license that is representative of the cultural practices and world view of indigenous peoples working in technology and who need a license to protect the work they do for their communities while still engaging with others outside of their community.
If you have ever spent time in Indian Country, you would know that cultural practices and traditions are shared amongst indigenous peoples. The Native American Church, which originated in Oklahoma, is now practiced amongst many Nations throughout America. The sharing of these teachings is not uncommon and demonstrates the willingness indigenous peoples have for teaching when someone is willing to listen and to carry on the ways in a respectful and disciplined manner.
How does this translate to a license? How can indigenous perspectives and beliefs be brought into this sphere? Open source is an interesting field since it reflects values that already exist in indigenous communities. For one, the belief that there is no individual ownership. One of the main tenets of OSS is the freedom to do anything one pleases with the software they obtain through an OSS license. You will see wording like, "permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software." This is mirrored in the indigenous practice of communal ownership.
Beyond just the principles there is also language. Using "lawyer speak" is not common whether amongst indigenous or non-indigenous peoples. The semantics that is used should be easy to understand in any context and shouldn't need a lawyer to help interpret. We aren't trying to trick anyone but instead speak from the heart. However, we do understand the implications of such a license and we will want it to hold up in a court of law. In some way, we will need to find a balance there.
These are just a few of the ideas that will influence the direction of the project. There is a need for this in indigenous communities as more of us become part of the tech community. However, we should be at the forefront of making this space our own, indicative of our values, and adhered to respectfully from outsiders. We are building amazing technologies for our communities but we want them to also be carried on in the right way. Now, we just have to figure out what that means.
The license that the community comes up with can be used in place of other popular open-source licenses such as MIT, Apache, Mozilla, and others. You will use it by adding a LICENSE file in the root of your project directory and adding the LICENSE in this repository to it.
This project is maintained by Natives in Tech. You can reach out to the project team through email at hello@nativesintech.org, or you can submit an issue and tag one of the team members in it.
All persons can contribute to the project. The way you can contribute is by forking this project and opening up a pull request that makes changes to the LICENSE. The changes will be reviewed by the Native in Tech team and after discussion, if the changes are in line with the vision, it will be merged into the source code.
See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for more information on how to engage with the community.
Until we have reached satisfaction with our LICENSE, we will be using the MIT license in the interim.