What license to use

[ensko]

Disclaimer: I look up licensing when I have to, but have no legal training in this or any other area.

The template is currently using the Unlicense, after previously being under the GPL. I have read (1, which references 2) that Unlicense is too "naive" to really work. There is also the CC0 which seems to have some high-profile adopters, so it might be a good replacement that get to the same goal, but with better chance of success.

I see the goal of this repository's license to be that any package can use it as the template, regardless of what license that package ends up using. It's thus not desirable to have a license that requires attribution. From what I can easily tell, that means that permissive licenses are not a good fit; the CC license chooser goes straight to CC0 when you select that attribution should not be necessary.

[jamesrswift]

I'm not fussed about the license at all. As this really is a template, its only included to indicate to the package author that they will want to include their own license. I'd think of it more as a placeholder. Perhaps we remove the license altogether and replace it with text that the author should replace with the appropriate license?

[ensko]

So I did a bit more reading and i think the only files that we theoretically even need to worry about are Justfile and .github/workflows/tests.yml - everything else should be minor enough to not be copyrightable anyway.

For those files, removing the license altogether would imo not be good: no license means no permission to use these files. For users that care, this would be a problem. One option is also to add a license directly to those files (then MIT would be appropriate, I think), and then have an empty LICENSE file as a placeholder.

In practice, it will probably not matter much what we do/if we change anything... It's just easier to change license things as long as the number of contributors is low.

[sebmestrallet]

The template README could just refer to typst/packages, I found the paragraphs about the license choice useful:

license: The package's license. Must contain a valid SPDX-2 expression describing one or multiple licenses that are either OSI-approved licenses or a version of CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, or CC0. We recommend you do not license your package using a Creative Commons license unless it is a derivative work of a CC-BY-SA-licensed work or if it is not primarily code, but content or data. In most other cases, a free/open license specific to software is better suited for Typst packages.
[...]
License: Packages must be licensed under the terms of an OSI-approved license. In addition to specifying the license in the TOML manifest, a package must either contain a LICENSE file or link to one in its README.md.
[...]
Additional details for template packages: If you expect the package license's provisions to apply to the contents of the template directory (used to scaffold a project) after being modified through normal use, especially if it still meets the threshold of originality, you must ensure that users of your template can use and distribute the modified contents without restriction. In such cases, we recommend licensing at least the template directory under a license that requires neither attribution nor distribution of the license text. Such licenses include MIT-0 and Zero-Clause BSD. You can use an SPDX AND expression to selectively apply different licenses to parts of your package. In this case, the README or package files must make clear under which license they fall. If you explain the license distinction in the README file, you must not exclude it from the package.

For the Typst template I published, I opted for MIT-0.