Hi everybody, One little voice that's been nagging at me for a while is that we ought to sort our wiki licensing for the future.
We've been going the head-under-sand route, but I worry that this will have some kind of adverse impact in the future when/if we start to add a lot more serious documentation, a revamped user manual or a Darcs Book. I think it may be good to have some sort of clear and explicit permission for re-use so that people can use our stuff with confidence. Uncertainty-induced inertia would be a bad thing. I propose that we add some variant of the following text to the wiki footer: Content created after 2010-09-30 is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license [1]. See License for content created prior to that date. The License page [2] is intended to help with prior content: here, authors can explicitly authorise their past changes to be available under the same terms (or public domain if they want). I find it slightly unfortunate for the footer text be so complicated. To simplify it to just say we're using a CC license, I'd need to know more about how one goes about about (re)licensing a wiki from basically no specified terms to something explicit. The route I suggest is what I think to be a conservative one in the absence of better research. For what it's worth, of the 5491 patches in the wiki: - 1575 are created by anonymous users (from the Moin era) - 2174 are by me - 1344 are by around twenty people with 10 contributions or more - 398 are by around 170 people with fewer than ten contributions So maybe we have some hope of just outright relicensing it if we can contact everybody and get them to OK the switch? This partly depends on whether or not it's "safe" to just relicense the 1575 anonymous contributions from the past. From a practical standpoint it seems like there is little risk of such an action coming back to haunt us in the future, but then again, prudence is a good thing... Thoughts? As for the choice of license, I don't have any strong feelings on the matter, but I was hoping for something * simple * permissive * widely known/recognised/understood (no need to think about it) * written by real lawyers Basically, whatever reduces friction in the long term. If I don't hear any objections or words of caution by Friday, I'll assume I have your blessing to proceed with the suggested changes. In the meantime, maybe you could add yourself to the license page below. Thanks! Eric [1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ [2] http://wiki.darcs.net/License -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> For a faster response, try +44 (0)1273 64 2905 or xmpp:ko...@jabber.fr (Jabber or Google Talk only)
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