Andre Schnabel wrote:
Interesting discussion, and necessary, too. We need to look
at how we can make the wiki usable for documentation purposes
either by changing the licensing of the wiki or the docs.
I see no reason to change the licensing at the wiki, as there is no
explicit license.
So that means that all pages on the wiki that currently
don't have an explicit license note carry no license at all
and that anyone who wants to reuse the content in any form
needs to contact the copyright holder for approval?
But who is the copyright holder? Do you look at the
wiki page history and identify the creator? What about
other contributors? Do I need to check back with everyone
on the history list?
If you like to use the wiki as tool for starting with documents (as
editing and changing is more easy there) simply put a licensing notice
to the relevant page. But you should do this when you create the page.
Changing a license after several people have contributed is a leghal
problem, as you need to ask all contributors if they agree to the
license change.
The Sun docs group is currently evaluating how we can get dev
docs onto the ooo wiki, but we're focussing on the technical
side, not the legal side. I'll send a separate posting next week
with some updates and details.
I would like to learn about compatibilities and incompatibilities
of the two channels (doc.oo.o and ooowiki). If the legal status
of the wiki is undefined this should be changed.
Why? The current status of the wiki is, that each contributor holds the
copyright of her contributions - and is free to put this under any license.
Given the technical nature of the wiki, each contributor agrees that her
work is published on the internet (at wiki.services.openoffice.org) and
that each page can be changed.
This does not imply that the content may be used elsewhere - unless the
contributor says so. This could easily be done by a license notice at a
wiki page.
I guess that means that every wiki page needs to have that
license notice, since wiki pages technically are independent
things that may (or may not) be grouped using other mechanisms
(like categories or toc pages)?
We're shooting ourselves in the foot if we're unable to
set up a consistent licensing story.
As I already said - it would be great to have a perfect consistent
licensing. This would help to merge different materials. But this would
have some drawbacks. No matter what "our rules" are - you cannot merge
PDL and Creative Commons. So neither removing "PDL only rule" from OOo
website nor applying the same rule to the wiki would help.
Anyway: I strongly recommend that any documentation work that is started
at the wiki is put under PDL - if possible. This would allow integration
with current documentation.
I guess that everything that was placed from the website to the wiki
is under PDL already?
Thanks
Frank
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