This posting covers the licensing of Jupyter Notebooks files and other types of mixed media material.
My first instinct was to expressly license the code with a software license and the text with a content license (as the respondents to Migdal (2015) also advise).
A skilled open source lawyer recently told me (off the record) that there is not need to specify that the software license covers the code and a Creative Commons license covers the content. Indeed the lawyer said that “my gut feeling is that the separation between content and code is sufficiently ill-defined in law that dual-licensing the whole allows for more legal certainty.”
The SPDX licensing system offers the conjunctive “and” operator to combine two licenses. So if you wish to retain attribution, use:
MIT AND CC‑BY‑4.0
And if you want to offer the material under the most permissive conditions, use a public domain waiver instead:
MIT AND CC0‑1.0
Note that a software license is required in both cases. Neither the CC‑BY‑4.0 license nor the CC0‑1.0 waiver alone provide the permissions necessary to load and run software. The MIT license also contains an implicit patent grant in the unlikely event that patentable material held by the coder is present.
Background
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Data Carpentry (no date). Sharing and publishing Jupyter notebooks: discussion. Sharing and publishing Jupyter notebooks. Oakland, California, USA.
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Migdal, Piotr (23 July 2015). Are IPython Notebooks code or slides? (for licensing purpose). Academia Stack Exchange.
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