The freedom to reuse code samples encourages the wider adoption of our APIs and spares you
from having to reinvent the wheel when you begin using our products. The freedom to create
derivative works from our documentation is beneficial to book authors, bloggers, and even
non-English speakers when members of the developer community translate our docs into
additional languages. It’s a winning situation for all of us!
During the intervening years, however, some docs were not explicitly licensed in this manner.
We wanted to bring them in line with this practice, so we embarked on a review of all our
documentation on developers.google.com
this week and made sure they all have a footer displaying the license they’re subject to. The
vast majority of our docs are now available under liberal terms that we hope will spur new
innovation in the community. In the rare cases where a doc isn’t being freely licensed for
some reason, we now clearly display “All rights reserved” so you aren’t left wondering. We’ve
also tweaked our internal process for publishing new documentation so that pages yet to be
written will display a license footer when they’re released. Here’s to the sharing of
knowledge!
Ashleigh
Rentz supports the team of technical writers who tirelessly document Google’s
developer products. She can often be seen skating down the hallways between
meetings.
By Ashleigh Rentz, Developer Programs team