Il 13/03/2015 18:52, Ryan Lane ha scritto:
On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 8:42 AM, Ricordisamoa
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
From
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitech:Labs_Terms_of_use
(verbatim): "Do not use or install any software unless the
software is licensed under an Open Source license".
What about tools and services made up of software themselves? Do
they have to be Open Source?
Strictly speaking, do the Terms of use require that all code be
made available to the public?
Thanks in advance.
As the person who wrote the initial terms and included this I can
speak to the spirit of the term (I'm not a lawyer, so I won't try to
go into any legal issues).
I created Labs with the intent that it could be used as a mechanism to
fork the projects as a whole, if necessary. A means to this end was
including non-WMF employees in the process of infrastructure
operations (which is outside the goals of the tools project in Labs).
Tools/services that are can't be distributed publicly harm that goal.
Tools/services that aren't open source completely break that goal.
It's fine if you wish to not maintain the code in a public git repo,
but if another tool maintainer wishes to publish your code, there
should be nothing blocking that.
Depending on external closed source services is a debatable topic. I
know in the past we've decided to allow it. It goes against the spirit
of the project, but it doesn't require us to distribute close sourced
software in the case of a fork.
My personal opinion is that your code should be in a public repository
to encourage collaboration. As the terms are written, though, your
code is required to be open source, and any libraries it depends on
must be as well.
- Ryan
Thanks for the clarification.
I do maintain my code in Git (except for a few quick-and-dirty scripts).
_______________________________________________
Labs-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/labs-l
