Re: Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

Simon Lees <[email protected]> Sun, 6 May 2018 19:19:15 +0930
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.xdg.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 06/05/18 17:40, Thomas Kluyver wrote:
> On Sun, May 6, 2018, at 8:40 AM, Simon Lees wrote:
>> Anyone
>> who goes to the effort of editing a wiki knows and acknowledges that the
>> content they have produced will be displayed on the wiki in its current
>> form and are therefore giving permission for the content they have
>> created to be redistributed by the wiki in its current form.
> 
> I'm fine with this 'implicit license' approach, but it's precisely the sort of grey area that other people insisted cannot possibly be allowed.
> 
I am only fine with the 'implicit license' approach for the one area I
mentioned (being distributed on the original wiki with the same access
that existed at the time of writing. Unless someone can point me to a
precedent that does otherwise.

> It's frustrating that people have the time and energy to argue about copyright, but nobody seems to be interested in doing anything to improve the wiki.
> 

The only way that I think we can realistically make the wiki situation
better is by changing it now to say new changes are under the following
license, then in 10 years hope that enough of the content has been
changed that someone can delete all the remaining non licensed content
then get someone else to fill in any gaps. (Note the person deleting the
content really needs to be different from the people writing the new
content, technically the people writing the new content probably should
have never read the old content).

I personally don't think any other approach is going to work, yes it
sucks, which is why i'm not spending time on it. (but I won't stop you
if you want to). If we were to go with the suggestion I wrote above
there are many others who could make that change easier then myself who
has no access. Where as contributing to this mailing list thread has
taken not much more then 10 minutes of my Sunday afternoon.

Either way if something is going to change there needs to be more
discussion yet as no one has agreed on which license we would use, which
you need to decide before contacting previous contributors. For example
if I wrote anything on the wiki which I don't think I did I would be
more then happy for it to be relicensed under a BSD/MIT style license
but would be less happy to allow because I don't think its the right
license for the task.

-- 

Simon Lees (Simotek)                            http://simotek.net

Emergency Update Team                           keybase.io/simotek
SUSE Linux                           Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30
GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

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