Background

We had a request to apply a license to our documentation, and even though this project is MIT licensed, I mistakenly thought that applied only to code and not to documentation. In fact, the MIT license specifically says that it also applies to the documentation (always read your licenses, folks!).

#17175 mentions that the CC license we applied is incompatible with open source licenses, which is true (verified by OpenJS legal). Some software scanners will flag this and mark the repo as not open source (technically incorrect, but scanners err on the side of false positives to be safe). Others can't contribute when there is a question about licensing.

So this was my mistake, and we should fix it ASAP.

Potential Solution

Because the MIT license actually does cover the documentation, the easiest path forward is to revert back to that and just make it clear by replacing all references to the CC license with references to the MIT license.

The steps would be:

1. Find all documentation-related commits since feat: docs license #17010 was merged.
2. Revert those documentation commits.
3. Revert feat: docs license #17010.
4. Ask people to resubmit the documentation from the removed commits.

It's kind of a pain, but it's the technically correct approach to this problem.