Relicensing wiki.mozilla.org to CC-BY-SA
Gervase Markham
codebase under the current tri-license so that our code could be used in
more contexts and circumstances, without losing copyleft. This has been
very successful, enabling projects like Songbird and Miro to happen
which otherwise couldn't due to licensing incompatibilities.
We'd now plan to do another similar, if smaller, thing. The Mozilla
project, and the world, has been moving towards Creative Commons
licences for non-code content. This is the licence used by the Mozilla
Developer Centre and by www.mozilla.org. However, anomalously,
wiki.mozilla.org is currently under the GNU FDL (Free Documentation
Licence). This is for no other reason than it was the MediaWiki default
at the time we set it up, and we inadvertently neglected to change it.
The GNU Project have generously added a relicensing clause to the most
recent version of the FDL, 1.3, to allow FDL wikis to relicense under
Creative Commons CC-BY-SA. wiki.mozilla.org is eligible to use this
exception. We plan to use it to make our wiki content solely CC-BY-SA,
and so interoperable with MDC, www.mozilla.org and the vast body of
other Creative Commons-licensed content around the world. We believe
that this is consistent with contributors' expectations based on their
experience with other Mozilla sites, and it will simplify moving
wiki.mozilla.org content to other such sites and remixing it with
content on those sites.
We want to be sure that people are OK with this, so if you have an
objection, please post it in mozilla.legal.
Gerv
Axel Hecht
I'm sure OK with this, but reading through
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html, I'm not sure if all our
material on wikimo actually falls under those terms, or if it just helps
us to limit the impact of people that we had to ask now? I'm slightly
confused by the impact of the two dates mentioned.
On an abstract level, GNU here reinforces my "ugh" on their "and future
versions of this license", as they're passing the license from one group
(GNU) to another group (CC) by the decision of a third (MMC). And their
rationale is more like "whatever".
Axel
Gervase Markham
> I'm sure OK with this, but reading through
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html, I'm not sure if all our
> material on wikimo actually falls under those terms, or if it just
> helps us to limit the impact of people that we had to ask now? I'm
> slightly confused by the impact of the two dates mentioned.
I'm pretty sure all material on wiki.mozilla.org is covered, but if
someone thinks otherwise, they should say.
There are three conditions:
> 1) The work must be available under the terms of FDL 1.3, which provides
> you with this permission. If the work was released under the terms of
> “the GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.2 or (at your option)
> any later version,” then it meets this criteria. *
wiki.mozilla.org is available under "the GNU Free Documentation License
(GFDL)": https://wiki.mozilla.org/MozillaWiki:About
I can't immediately see a version number on the copyrights page, and the
FDL says:
"If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you
may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free
Software Foundation."
> 2) The work must not have any “Cover Texts” or “Invariant Sections.”
> These are optional features in all versions of the FDL.
wiki.mozilla.org does not use either of these features.
> 3) If the work was originally published somewhere other than a public
> wiki, it must have been added to a wiki (or some other kind of web
> site where the general public could review and edit the materials)
> before November 1, 2008.
As far as I know, all wiki.mozilla.org content was originally published
on a public wiki (wiki.mozilla.org itself) so this clause does not
apply. And even if some was not, if it was added before November 1st
2008, we are OK anyway. We only have a problem if there's content on
there which was originally published elsewhere and then was added to
wiki.mozilla.org after November 1st 2008.
> On an abstract level, GNU here reinforces my "ugh" on their "and
> future versions of this license", as they're passing the license from
> one group (GNU) to another group (CC) by the decision of a third
> (MMC). And their rationale is more like "whatever".
MMC?
Gerv
Axel Hecht
Their term in the license to say wiki without saying wiki, though they
say wiki at one point :-)
Thanks for the reply
Axel