Re: xemacs wiki

"Ben Wing" <[email protected]> writes:

> i'm more and more starting to believe that most wiki's should be public domain.

Note that in the non-common-law countries (ie. most of Europe)
copyright is in fact a collection of rights, and you cannot sign away
*all* the rights that you have.  Thus, the concept of "public domain"
does not exist, or if at all, you could say that copyright expiry
puts a work in the "public domain".

Here in Switzerland, therefore, I can only promise not to enforce my
copyright, I cannot sign it away and donate my stuff to the public
domain.  My best bet would therefore be to craft my own (very simple)
license terms.  But I won't get around writing *something*.  I've
heard people say that "primarily public domain" should cover this
(http://www.primarilypublicdomain.org) -- but I'm not sure.

The real reason I prefer copyleft to public domain in any case is not
that it gives us some sort of real advantage (as you say yourself, the
real BSD vs. Linux issue is a human factor, not licensing) -- rather,
the point is that if somebody downloads the entire wiki, edits it,
and prints a book, I want them to share it with everybody else.  This
is why I want them to put the edited text on a CD or on a website so
that we can copy the occasional improvements.

The reason I don't like the GFDL is that it is so damn complicated.  I
even wrote a simplified "free website license" once
(http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?FreeWebsiteLicense).  At the
moment the Creative Commons ShareAlike license does what I had hoped
the GFDL does, but it is simpler.  And as an added bonus, it is well
known and well supported.

If I had to start a new wiki, I'd use the Creative Commons ShareAlike
license.  For my community wiki (http://www.communitywiki.org) I chose
a ShareAlike/FDL dual license so that content can be added to
wikipedia.

But really, I guess I just want a simple license like this one:

* You may copy, modify, and/or distribute the work.
* You must grant the recipients the rights.
* You must inform the recipients of their rights.
* You may change the license to the GPL, GFDL, or the CC SA when
  distributing the work.

Alex.
-- 
http://www.emacswiki.org/alex/
There is no substitute for experience.