Fwd: License for MML

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Petr Pudlak <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 07:57:52 +0100
Subject: Re: License for MML
To: Josef Urban <[email protected]>
Cc: "Dr. Stephan Schulz" <[email protected]>,
[email protected], [email protected], Geoff Sutcliffe
<[email protected]>, [email protected], [email protected], Jesse
Alama <[email protected]>

    Hi Josef and others,

I agree with Stephan. I'd go with CC-BY-SA or GFDL. AFAIK CC is better
suited for the purpose. It is a bit less restrictive than GFDL, but still
protects the authors and the copyleft. CC licenses are more international
[2] than GFDL, which also may be a benefit. Also according to [1], CC-BY-SA is
better suited for wikis than GFLD. A more thorough comparison may be
found at [3].

[1] http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Creative_Commons#Wikimedia_and_Creative_Commons
[2] http://creativecommons.org/international/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comparison_of_GFDL_and_CC-BY-SA

I also looked at GFDL v1.3 FAQ [5]. According to this, GFDL v1.3 allowed
the content to be re-licensed under CC-BY-SA under certain conditions.
However, if I understand it correctly, this was only possible until
August 1, 2009.

[5] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html

I suppose that there is always the option of multi-licensing [4]. That
is, the wiki documents and their changes would be licensed both under
GFDL and CC-BY-SA. Others then would be able to work with the documents
only under one of these licenses.
(Note that this has nothing to do with the compatibility of these
licenses. The original authors may decide to release their work under
both of these licenses. This is what Mozilla Firefox does - it's
licensed under MPL/GPL/LGPL.) The problem is of course that all users
that contribute to the wiki should also accept both these licenses,
otherwise you'll get a legal mess where different parts of the documents
are licensed under different licenses -- see Controversy in [4].
However, it seems to work in practise, I suppose that practically the
whole Wikipedia is dual-licensed.

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multi-licensing

With best regards,
  Petr

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 09:01:21PM +0200, Dr. Stephan Schulz wrote:
> Hi Josef, Adam, People!
>
> On 21 Feb 2010, at 20:48, Adam Pease wrote:
>
> >Hi Josef,
> >  On the Global WordNet project we've listed a few license options at
> >http://www.globalwordnet.org/gwa/gwa_grid.htm.  I like GNU FDL for
> >data
> >and documentation since it protects the authors from use without
> >credit.
> >  For SUMO I originally released it under a BSD-style license for the
> >upper level and GNU GPL for the domain ontologies  I think that's
> >been a
> >reasonable if sub-optimal choice, but since I made the release with my
> >former employer, who retains the copyright, I can't change it now.
> >The
> >copyright, as I understand it, is distinct from the license
> >restrictions.  If you have the copyright, I think you're free to
> >control
> >what license applies to the work.
> >  Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so take my advice with a grain of salt.
>
>
> The GFDL certainly is a reasonable choice. However, it has some warts,
> and large collaborative projects (in particular Wikipedia) have been
> moving (with support from the Free Software Foundation) to the
> Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license.
>
> The CC-BY-SA license allows redistribution and changes, but requires
> maintaining the license and recognizing the contributors.
>
> See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
>
> I would suggest using that license, with the GFDL as second choice.
>
> Bye,
>
>     Stephan
>
> --
> -------------------------- It can be done!
> ---------------------------------
>    Please email me as [email protected] (Stephan Schulz)
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
>
>
>