Cribbing code from the wiki
Bob Jolliffe
on the wiki, as part of some discussion or as illustrations of good
ideas.
It is not quite clear to me to what extent I can just copy and paste
and use such code in my open source project. is there a general
licence text (eg BSD-ish or public domain) which we can assume applies
to such
snippets? If so would it be worth putting some kind of licence terms
explicitly on the wiki which authors implicitly agree to when pasting
code. perhaps somewhere on the "About the Wiki" page
http://wiki.tcl.tk/20791.
For example, I really like the tooltips code at
http://wiki.tcl.tk/1954. (there are quite a few tooltips/balloon help
snippets around, but I like this one). Can I use it in my project?
Together with a citation of the wiki page. Or would I have to
individually negotiate licence with particular posters of particular
snippets?
Any suggestions to what is good practice would be welcome.
regards
Bob
jemptymethod
> Like many others, I am always finding useful snippets of code posted
> on the wiki, as part of some discussion or as illustrations of good
> ideas.
>
> It is not quite clear to me to what extent I can just copy and paste
> and use such code in my open source project. is there a general
> licence text (eg BSD-ish or public domain) which we can assume applies
> to such
> snippets? If so would it be worth putting some kind of licence terms
> explicitly on the wiki which authors implicitly agree to when pasting
>
> For example, I really like the tooltips code athttp://wiki.tcl.tk/1954. (there are quite a few tooltips/balloon help
> snippets around, but I like this one). Can I use it in my project?
> Together with a citation of the wiki page. Or would I have to
> individually negotiate licence with particular posters of particular
> snippets?
>
> Any suggestions to what is good practice would be welcome.
To me it would seem to be in the public domain. Usually I simply cite
the page as well.
jbr
jemptymethod
> Code posted to the wiki is copyright by the author. Several wiki participants declare their BSDa, GNU or public domain intentions in specific posts or on their "home" wiki pages. In the US it is near impossible to move code to the public domain and it certainly doesn't occur by default.
Thanks for the clarification
Bob Jolliffe
> Code posted to the wiki is copyright by the author. Several wiki participants declare their BSDa, GNU or public domain intentions in specific posts or on their "home" wiki pages. In the US it is near impossible to move code to the public domain and it certainly doesn't occur by default.
Yes that is my understanding as well (yet another example where US
copyright law doesn't adequately reflect what is the probable intent
of the author). Given that it would be difficult and maybe impossible
to apply blanket licence conditions to all wiki postings, especially
retroactively, it would be useful if all author's did as you suggest
above. The tooltips code I referred to earlier is effectively off
limits to me currently. And made worse by the fact that it is
apparently based on some earlier code of unknown origin. But I still
think it's cool - I guess I will learn from the technique, then close
my eyes and recreate it from scratch :-)
Bob
Koen Danckaert
> It is not quite clear to me to what extent I can just copy and paste
> and use such code in my open source project. is there a general
> licence text (eg BSD-ish or public domain) which we can assume applies
> to such
> snippets? If so would it be worth putting some kind of licence terms
> explicitly on the wiki which authors implicitly agree to when pasting
> code. perhaps somewhere on the "About the Wiki" page
> http://wiki.tcl.tk/20791.
jemptymethod
From said page: "Morally, it's of course reprehensible to copy the
material without attribution"
"Reprehensible" seems a bit strong, especially given that previously
that page states "the wiki .... is for all
practical purposes in the public domain".
"Dubious" on the other hand is an adjective I could agree to in place
of reprehensible. That being said, whenever I find code of any sort
(these days it's usually Javascript/ExtJS code) on a forum, I always
comment the code with a link back to where I found it.
Bob Jolliffe
Thanks for the link. That is what I had been looking for and
struggling to find. It would be informative to link to this page from
"Aboout the Wiki".
What I am going to do is to put our usual copyright notice on a file
called tooltips.tcl - "Copyright University of Oslo, ... BSD
terms ..." followed by an attribution saying "# This code is based
substantially on code originally found at http://wiki.tcl.tk/1954".
Note that I can't not put a copyright notice of some sort as it needs
to be clear what other people can do with this file, and we will
almost certainly modify it, but neither am I trying to pass it off as
originally mine. Does this seem ok?
Regards
Bob
Uwe Klein
> From said page: "Morally, it's of course reprehensible to copy the
> material without attribution"
>
> "Reprehensible" seems a bit strong, especially given that previously
> that page states "the wiki .... is for all
> practical purposes in the public domain".
Public domain does not allow you to present something as your own.
( though it is popular see Operation Paperclip material making it into
the natively US-invented domain ;-)
Laxness in attribution is a killer:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,748330,00.html
uwe
Gerald W. Lester
Seems great!
--
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Gerald W. Lester, President, KNG Consulting LLC |
| Email: Gerald...@kng-consulting.net |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Kevin Walzer
> What I am going to do is to put our usual copyright notice on a file
> called tooltips.tcl - "Copyright University of Oslo, ... BSD
> terms ..." followed by an attribution saying "# This code is based
> substantially on code originally found at http://wiki.tcl.tk/1954".
> Note that I can't not put a copyright notice of some sort as it needs
> to be clear what other people can do with this file, and we will
> almost certainly modify it, but neither am I trying to pass it off as
> originally mine. Does this seem ok?
>
> Regards
> Bob
Seems reasonable to me.
I've cribbed large amounts of code from the wiki, with attribution.
That's what it is there for. The only time I leave code untouched is if
the author explicitly licenses it under the GPL, which won't work for my
purposes.
--Kevin
--
Kevin Walzer
Code by Kevin
http://www.codebykevin.com
jemptymethod
Very topical, thanks!