Recommend some basic discussion items to new hackers around reuse, promotion, compensation, and attribution.

Our policy at Open City and DataMade have been to use the MIT license, as it is open and very permissive (only attribution is required).

You can also see the full list of open source licenses that OpenSouce.org recommends here: https://opensource.org/licenses

@karlfogel is one of the leading experts in this field and wrote a very well regarded book on it: http://producingoss.com/

I'm sure he has thoughts on this ;-)

Also, I think Chi Hack Night should not dictate what licenses people should use, and probably doesn't even need to provide recommendations. I'd rather point off to a resource like OpenSource.org, which is maintained exactly for this purpose, and let people decide from there.

Yeah, I have a browser tab open to check out that book. :) From my perspective, dictating or even recommending seems heavy handed. Educating seems more appropriate. I could see there being a one-time or occasional breakout group giving an overview of different licenses, including a reminder to discuss this with your breakout group to reach consensus on which one to use.

[Blushing at the nice comments on the book -- thanks Derek and (by implication) Kristi.]

I agree we shouldn't be recommending a particular license at Chi Hack Night. However, one thing we see with some frequency at Hack Night is people conflating non-open source licenses (like some of the Creative Commons licenses, namely any of their -NC and -ND variants) with open source licenses. To the extent we provide guidelines, I think we should help people understand the distinction between "Free" and "Non-Free" licenses. See http://freedomdefined.org/, for example, though that's probably not the site to point people to for an overview.

Regarding "Do we all agree on whether there will be a revenue-generating aspect to this project?": I think with open source, you just can't know in advance. Deciding whether to try to generate revenue is a decision a group makes about itself -- e.g., it's about members' conduct and about their relationship to each other. But it's not about the project itself, in the sense of the code, because even if no one in this group decides to use the code to generate revenue, some other person group might come along and do that -- it's open source, after all.

I think deciding whether to be open source is also a group decision.

Besides licenses, it's good to discuss how to attribute work within the Hack Night project. Do people want to be named? What online presence do they want you to link to? What's useful and desirable to the group for promoting the project, if anything?

I think the education on types of licenses is the main takeaway from this item. The other things are good project communication that could be quickly touched on in 101 or mentored to new groups.