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I recall an original consensus reading "Public Domain" on the code matter, and the corresponding lack of a benevolent dictator to declare that to be our wikilaw.

EDIT: in any case, CC licenses are not compatible with either "Public Domain" and "All Rights Reserved", and the added code is thus in copyright violation.

Combuster wrote:...and the corresponding lack of a benevolent dictator to declare that to be our wikilaw.

It's your turn.

CC BY-SA 3.0 lets us use text from Wikipedia and modify it, and is also compatible with public domain. Clicky!

Too late. The masses have already decided three years ago with 13 to one vote. I already went ahead to be the dictator and updated the license and copyright page, and consequently fixing the copyright issues that were recently introduced. You folks might want to proofread them.

Besides, the only kind of text I've seen coming from wikipedia is blablabla 1998 blablabla 2004 blablabla better than blablabla profit. Rare occasions aside there is little technical information to source from wikipedia. (And speaking of that, wikipedia should be standard in an initial search query on a subject, we should not need to copy anything)

I didn't read the whole thread, nor do I care much about the license of the wiki. I just saw the last couple of posts and thought that link might be relevant.

Combuster wrote:Too late. The masses have already decided three years ago with 13 to one vote. I already went ahead to be the dictator and updated the license and copyright page, and consequently fixing the copyright issues that were recently introduced. You folks might want to proofread them.

Besides, the only kind of text I've seen coming from wikipedia is blablabla 1998 blablabla 2004 blablabla better than blablabla profit. Rare occasions aside there is little technical information to source from wikipedia. (And speaking of that, wikipedia should be standard in an initial search query on a subject, we should not need to copy anything)

Neither of the edits you made actually says anything substantiative; i.e. they will not hold up as a statement of license in a court of law.

My personal suggestion would be to declare that all submitted content is CC0. Making something CC0 is a public domain declaration, except that when such is not possible (E.G. resident citizens of Germany, as in Solar's case), it devolves into a broad grant of all possible rights.

I would also add text like the following to the edit page next to the submit button:

By submitting this content, I hereby declare I have read and understand the terms and intended legal effect of CC0, and hereby voluntarily elect to apply it to this work. I understand that by doing so I hereby waive all copyright and related or neighboring rights together with all associated claims and causes of action with respect to this work to the extent possible under the law.

I would then contact all contributors who can be identified (i.e. did not submit content anonymously) and source their consent to relicense their content. Any content for which authorship can not be established (and where the content was not submitted anonymously), or whereby the author does not give consent or fails to respond, which is not established to be trivial (and therefore not eligible for copyright protection) should be removed. Then we can declare the content of the wiki to be all CC0.

With regards to the above text: It is a trivial reformation of the text that Creative Commons use on their website. However, I provide it on an as-is basis.

Owen wrote:My personal suggestion would be to declare that all submitted content is CC0. Making something CC0 is a public domain declaration, except that when such is not possible (E.G. resident citizens of Germany, as in Solar's case), it devolves into a broad grant of all possible rights.

Nice link. I didn't know that CC added this to their license portfolio.

Just as a sidenote, and as reference for other Germans here, the German CC page touches some of the legal issues. In one sentence, some of the statements in CC0 are bordercase in German law, and it is uncertain if they would hold up in court - especially the part about "irrevocability" of the license.

But all in all, it's a good thing, and IMHO the logical choice for the Wiki. I'll adopt it for PDCLib, too.

The official CC suggestions for applying CC0 to software are here. The suggestion to put the plain-text version of the license in a file named COPYING seems strange to me; a file with that name in my experience normally contains the GPL, and non-GPL software generally seems to use LICENSE

Owen wrote:The suggestion to put the plain-text version of the license in a file named COPYING seems strange to me; a file with that name in my experience normally contains the GPL, and non-GPL software generally seems to use LICENSE

CC and the Free Software Foundation suggest...

Means, they've counseled with the FSF on the subject, and the FSF naturally suggested to follow their example.

Ok, license statements updated again. I also started on a checklist of people from whom we need an license statement. Since that involves going down the entire user list is nowhere near done, but I started with the more familiar names to at least get the main contributors visible.

Ok, where do we post the licence statement for our content? I don't really care what licence my contributions are under, I just like to help

Combuster, how does this work? Do you need individual contributions relicensed, or is it sufficient to have a blanket statement by the author? If the latter, how do we collect them? Certainly not as posts to this forum thread?

I'm perfectly willing to re-license under CC0 (surprise!), but I'm a bit fuzzy about the best way to have it done.

Any form should do, as long as the contributer knows what the consequences are and he explicitly mentions both the license and the entirety of the work in question (so that the statement retains its value even when taken out of context). We all know that posting code somewhere and mentioning a license is just as legally sufficient (otherwise we are forced to ignore the BSD license at the top of some file and ask for a written signature for each code snippet we want to reuse). IANAL though.

I would not do it in a publicly editable medium, such as the wiki itself. A forum post would be sufficient (better not to do in this thread please), or alternatively a mail to Chase.

A separate thread where every contributor to the Wiki is engouraged to post that his work are licensed as CC0?

That would still require people to check who contributed what to each article, and whether all involved posted to that license thread...

Or some bot to do the checking and flagging articles as "clean"...

Or someone, after some time, kicking non-poster's content out of the Wiki...

And even then, quite some of the content was done pre-Mediawiki, and I don't think we've got the edit history from then...

Gosh, what a mess

Solar wrote:Gosh, what a mess

Tell me about it. Which is why the decision should rather have been sooner (i.e. 3.5 years ago) rather than later.

And no there's no history of MTFAQ content. The semi-fortunate thing about that is that the publisher's rule applies as Chase mentioned earlier (i.e. the license Chase chooses until the author asserts his copyright) and we have no need to care about it now. Besides, several key authors of then also happened to be author here and can therefore assert copyright if necessary (I'm looking at you )