Fix #3518 rewrite de-indexing policy

[JonnyOThan]

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[HebaruSan]

Thanks for taking this on! This is a huge improvement over the old policy.

I made a bunch of edits, largely tweaking the phrasing slightly in a few places, especially the "takes licenses seriously" part that evokes the old policy and its "your license lets us do whatever we want" attitude. The opt-out list was a key part of the settlement of the old controversy, so it deserves a mention here. I also felt it was important to add a "fix problems if we can" step to the de-indexing section, so people aren't surprised when we ask them what's wrong.

[JonnyOThan]

Hah, I didn't interpret the "takes licenses seriously" thing to imply "we can do what we want with mods that have permissive licenses." I actually intended it in the opposite manner (as I hoped the body would make clear), we act to protect the license rights of mod authors against infringement by others.

IMO CKAN is not distributing mods, so the llicense of the mod has nothing to do at all with whether it can be indexed on CKAN. It is relevant to the archive.org backup thing of course.

This all looks pretty good to me.

[JonnyOThan]

Yeah to be honest the change to "but does not use them as an excuse to do things mod authors do not want" sounds kind of weird if you don't know the history here (as I suspect most people reading this probably won't). I'm a little concerned it could be used against us at some point. The original language, on its face, doesn't really promise any action one way or another - it merely states a principle we think is important. I agree that keeping the old language could be weird to people who DO know the history, but I think in context it really changes the meaning.

I don't feel that strongly about it, so whatever you decide is fine with me.

[HebaruSan]

In the original policy, most of the document was focused on explaining how and why most de-indexing requests would be denied, using permissive licenses as justification. That phrase was there to lead in to the explanation of why the team back then would not do what authors asked.

This argument was both legally dubious (as you say, we don't "distribute" mods any more than Firefox and Google do) and a distraction from the question of what kind of policy would be best for all parties.

My problem with "takes licenses very seriously" is not that it clearly means that same policy holds, but that its meaning is ambiguous and subtly refers back to that policy where an explicit clean break is preferable.

[JonnyOThan]

Right, principles are simple (sometimes ambiguous) statements of values "X is important." The body of the document goes into what it actually means.

I know we're splitting hairs here, but something about the new language just feels a little weird to me. The "very" in the old one is also a little odd. How about:

CKAN takes mod authors' licensing rights seriously

[HebaruSan]

That's a nice compromise. It focuses on what licenses do for authors rather than making them a liability. Go for it.

[HebaruSan]

Looks good, might as well merge now. If other team members have feedback, we can always make further changes.