Hi All, Long mail sorry, please read at least the first five paragraphs, as they are the critical ones. I'm happy to receive comments on this, please try and keep onlist replies to topics that are of interest to *all* readers only. Currently the wiki states that copyright is retained by the author of the page, but provides no details on the acceptable uses of that content. This leaves the situation quite murky. Clearly it is highly desirable to have a much more definite situation regarding the licensing of wiki content. To this end the Committee has decided that going forward the wiki content will be licensed under the Creative Commons Wiki License. Details information on this can be found at http://www.wlug.org.nz/WlugWikiLicense in short it allows anyone to copy / modify / distribute the wiki content provided that they a) attribute its source as the WlugWiki b) provide the copied / modified / distributed content under the same license as they are using it under (ie the WlugWikiLicense). As a wiki author it means that you are agreeing that your content can be used in the ways specified by the license and you are waiving your rights to attribution in favour of the content being attributed to the Wiki. You'll still get your name displayed on the wiki in the recent changes / page history / etc :) If you're an author (have ever added or edited content to the wiki, please add the following code to your HomePage to indicate that you are happy for all your past / future content to be licensed under the WlugWikiLicense. ---- I agree to the WlugWikiLicense%%% [http://www.wlug.org.nz/theme/WLUG05/cc-wiki.gif] ----
From the date Mon 18 July 2005 00:00 NZST onwards all authors making additions and modifications to the wiki must agree to provide their content under the WlugWikiLicense. This will be clearly described on the edit page from this date forth so that everyone understands this.
----- Critical bit ends now - thanks for your patience ------ The remainder of this email deals with our plans for the significant issue of how to relicense the existing wiki content in an appropriate and acceptable manner. In this process the committee is trying to balance the need to have a robust defendable process for relicensing the content, with the common belief that anyone who added content to the wiki (by it's very nature) was implicitly agreeing that it could be further copied / modified / distributed. While we think that there is a very strong argument for this interpretation we would still like to set a good example by obtaining permission to relicense from authors wherever possible. Obviously there will be some content (imported manpages / howtos / etc) that we may not be able to relicense, so for the forseeable future there will be certain pages in the wiki that will not be under the CreativeCommons license. Each page will clearly describe the terms that it is licensed under. It is the committees intention to work with wiki authors over time to bring more and more content under the new license, with the eventual goal of having all content in the wiki available under the same license. This may take some time :) 1) As described above the first step in the migration plan is to get every author to add to their page a statement that they agree to the WlugWikiLicense 2) A plugin will be written to analyse each page and the individual diffs that constitute the current version of this. 3) For each diff the author will be looked up to see if they have agreed to the new license 4) If all authors of significant diffs that constitute the present version of the page have agreed to the creative commons license the page will be licensed under creative commons, otherwise it will remain as is. 5) Significant diffs as mentioned above must meet two criteria 1) They were not marked as a 'Minor change' when they were made 2) They add or modify more than 10 lines of the page content and contain new material (ie. A 20 line diff that fixes capitalisation and punctuation is not significant). Hopefully this is an acceptable process that will allow us to progressively bring the entire wiki under the new license as we gain acceptance from more and more authors, and as pages naturally grow and are modified with new content under the new license. Pages containing both old content and new licensed content will default to being displayed as they currently are (ie not under the new license). Futher details are available at http://www.wlug.org.nz/WlugWikiLicense and I am happy to clarify any details that I've missed out of this email. Thanks for your patience, -- Matt Brown Wlug Commitee Member matt(a)mattb.net.nz Mob +64 275 611 544 www.mattb.net.nz