what is the license of the text at www.osdev.org/wiki ?

[Kevin McGuire]

@Tyler:
You actually made sense.

--

Well. I am actually glad since for about three months I have been working on a book by doing minimal editing and reformatting. And I am not going to give any form of attribution since you guys have expressed over a few months that there is no value in any of the contents of the Wiki. The whole purpose for carrying to conversation to and beyond was just to make sure that is would be ok to copy directly from the Wiki.

Thanks.

[chase]

Well the polls indicate that most people want a Public Domain license and going by number of votes that more people care about the license of the source code than the text of the wiki itself. I'm going to attempt to contact all the authors I can via email before making the official license declaration. Should have everything clarified by the beginning of June.

[Combuster]

Should have everything clarified by the beginning of June.

Its well into July by now... Somebody should 'commit' the license to the wiki? I can rewrite some pages, but I don't have the admin access that is needed for some things.

[chase]

Yeah, I know I'm taking way too long on this. Some of what I need to do involves data minning the old Mega-Tokyo phpwiki for email addresses of committers so I can contact the original contributers. It shouldn't take that long but I've been flying around the US a bunch in the last 3 months. I should be able to get to it at or right after the end of this month.

[pcmattman]

Would it be possible to apply the license to certain parts of the wiki and label others as 'undecided'?

[chase]

Would it be possible to apply the license to certain parts of the wiki and label others as 'undecided'?

I think almost everyone wants the entire wiki under a single license just to make things easier. However if you want to use the wiki to host your own tutorials or examples under a separate license you can. Just place the pages in your user space. An example of a user space page would be http://www.osdev.org/wiki/User:Chase/temp . Anything under the User: namespace you can license however you want. Just don't have pages in the default namespace linking to your pages differently than you would any other off-site page.

[Mr.Confuzed]

I don't see the license notice on the main page. Is this still going to happen?

The way I see it, it doesn't really matter what we do about this. If we leave it alone, all rights are reserved, and developers are legally required to write their own code instead of directly copying it. This is irritating, but a good idea anyway because it helps them understand what is actually happening. If we apply public domain, the work can be legally copied and sold, but honestly, how much money could possibly be made from this anyway. I figure those of us who want the information will look here, or at least online before buying it.

Either way, I don't foresee any problems. Of course, crazier thing have happened...

[stephenj]

I'd just like to contribute a link to the SQLite project about licensing (I've heard about this issue before, but this was the first link I found):
http://sqlite.org/copyright.html

In particular, here are some reasons they give for wanting a license:
"# You are using SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the public domain.
# You are using SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the right of an author to dedicate their work to the public domain. "

The best way to ensure that code can be used by everybody might be to use a permissive license (like the BSD, MIT, or ISC License). Or more interestingly enough, if a nation doesn't accept the existence of a public domain, then dual-licensing may be a possible work around (since nations that do accept the PD will ignore the other license... This reminds me of a terrible CSS hack I once used to get something working in IE).

Of course, IANAL, but this course of action may be the most desirable.

[chase]

Yeah, those are some of the issues why this is still pending. Almost everyone here wants Public Domain but it's just not legally possible. And in some places an author can remove their work from the public domain. So far the best solution I've come up with is to have all the content of the wiki (the main namespaces) be the property of osdev.org and then have osdev.org release it to the public under PD and a BSD license. I need to see if I can get osdev.org made into an non-profit organization so everyone will be ok with giving their work to it.

[Virtlink]

Hi everybody, and chase,

How is the current status of the OSDev wiki licensing project? Any progress?

Sincerely,
Virtlink

[Troy Martin]

Not sure, but is this really an "authorized mirror" of the wiki's project list? http://www.osdcom.info/content/view/28/38/

[Combuster]

Being that you are free to copy, you could call that authorized. That doesn't prevent it from being horribly out of date

[Troy Martin]

Although I think that the word "authorized" should be used for something that you've been given explicit permission to do.

[Solar]

Yay, necromancy!

User Communistpancake has added several pages to the Wiki, quoting Wikipedia as the source.

Wikipedia provides its information under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I don't think it is a good idea to use Wikipedia material in our Wiki. One, I don't know if such use is allowed by the Wikipedia license. Two, I don't feel like digging through the CC-ASA 3.0 to find out.

Botom line, we left the subject of "what's the OSDev Wiki License?" unresolved. We should resolve this before we get tangled in an unresolvable license mess...

[Solar]

I seriously despise license statements that take a lawyer to decipher.