Problem with our wiki license

[quaid]

Back before the initial CLS, I asked he dould remove the NC
restriction on the CLS website, or at least the wiki. Jono agreed
with me, but in the runu-up to that event, the license metadata fro
the wiki was unfortunately never changed. Since then all the work
we've done on the wiki has been under the CC BY NC SA.

The reason this is a problem is that we now cannot share the
increasing wealth of knowledge in this wiki with any other content
resource within our community of practice. For example, none of the
material can be merged in to the Community Management Wiki or The Open
Source Way:

http://communitymgt.wikia.com/wiki/Community_Management_Wiki

http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki

In addition, we cannot merge in to other NC works, such as "Art of
Community".

Because of this situation, I can no longer contribute to the CLS
wiki. On Saturday, I took extensive notes of the session on "The Open
Source Way", and it is deeply ironic that I almost doomed those notes
to be unusable for the handbook!

For the work I did Saturday, I am going to move it from the CLS wiki
to The Open Source Way wiki, leaving a link behind. I am hereby
revoking the license that I put on that work by adding it to the CLS
wiki. Instead it will be under the CC BY SA.

Retroactively, I want to relicense all the content I have contributed
to the CLS wiki. I may not be able to effectively extract it,
however, being interwoven with other copyright material from other
contributors.

Even though it sounds like a bit of work, do any of you think it is
worth it to contact all authors, inform our community, and do a
relicensing of the CLS wiki so it can be free and open?

Here is good article discussing the problems with the CC NC license:

http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC

Here is my post from last year on this topic:

https://groups.google.com/group/community-leadership-summit/browse_thread/thread/a2c66047d80f27d3/390655d443cf4c69?lnk=gst&q=Karsten#390655d443cf4c69

The initial email to Jono must have been a private post, probably
before this group was started.

Thanks,

- Karsten

[David Strauss]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 16:27, quaid <karst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>  I am hereby revoking the license that I put on that work by adding it to the CLS wiki.

You can't technically revoke it. Should we assume that you're kindly
requesting that people distribute the work under the more permissive
license?

--
David Strauss
   | da...@davidstrauss.net

[Karsten Wade]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 4:38 PM, David Strauss <da...@davidstrauss.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 16:27, quaid <karst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>  I am hereby revoking the license that I put on that work by adding it to the CLS wiki.
>
> You can't technically revoke it. Should we assume that you're kindly
> requesting that people distribute the work under the more permissive
> license?

Hmm, that doesn't quite sound like my intent.

My intent is that my copyright work be under the more permissive
license. (FreedomDefined.org argues the NC is less permissive than
pure copyright, and maybe this is exactly why?)

My intent is that the work no longer be under the NC license.

Are you saying (without giving legal advice, natch) that I cannot have
my second intention once having put it under the NC in the first
place?

If that is the case, what does that mean for the idea that we can
obtain all copyright holders' permissions to remove the NC from our
collective work?

- Karsten
--
Karsten Wade -- http://iquaid.org | http://Fairy-TaleFarm.com
http://identi.ca/quaid
http://twitter.com/quaid
gpg key : AD0E0C41

[David Strauss]

On Sun, 2011-01-16 at 16:50 -0800, Karsten Wade wrote:
> Are you saying (without giving legal advice, natch) that I cannot have
> my second intention once having put it under the NC in the first
> place?

Correct. Once you've put your work under a CC license, it's irrevocable.
Now, it would be silly for someone to choose to use or redistribute your
work under the non-commercial license variant when you've also offered
the unrestricted use one as well (because it'd be dumb to risk one's use
being found "commercial"), but they technically could.

It's important that we not express any licensing change as a
"revocation" because that implies that the licenses are revocable.

> If that is the case, what does that mean for the idea that we can
> obtain all copyright holders' permissions to remove the NC from our
> collective work?

We can't ever "remove" the NC license from the collective work. We can,
with all copyright holders' permission, do this:

* "Distribute" the wiki content under the more permissive
(commercial use-tolerant) license
* Stop distributing the wiki content under the NC license
* Require new contributors to license their new and derivative
work, when posted to our wiki, under the more permissive license

Notably, we're not "removing" or "revoking" any existing license to
existing content.

--
David Strauss
| da...@davidstrauss.net
| +1 512 577 5827 [mobile]

[Karsten Wade]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 5:07 PM, David Strauss <da...@davidstrauss.net> wrote:
>
> Notably, we're not "removing" or "revoking" any existing license to
> existing content.

Makes sense, thanks for the clarification.

An important question is, do other members of the CLS community want
to see our wiki distributed under a different license and future
contributions be under the more permissive CC BY SA?

I'm not overly keen on taking on the work involved, but I'm also not
keen on another-CLS-event-with-a-jailed-up-wiki.

[David Strauss]

On Sun, 2011-01-16 at 17:15 -0800, Karsten Wade wrote:
> An important question is, do other members of the CLS community want
> to see our wiki distributed under a different license and future
> contributions be under the more permissive CC BY SA?

I would absolutely support the change. The "open source way" is about
confidence in your ability to modify and share. The "non-commercial"
restrictions on some CC license variants are notoriously confusing and
thus create a mild chilling effect. For example, the NC clauses are
generally interpreted to disallow recouping your cost of distribution,
so people with Google Adsense on their site may shy away from reposting
the work. Field-of-use restrictions are always a minefield.

> I'm not overly keen on taking on the work involved, but I'm also not
> keen on another-CLS-event-with-a-jailed-up-wiki.

We could change the overall wiki license to be CC-BY-SA and add a
template to existing pages to note the exception to the overall wiki
license. We could then email everyone requesting that they review their
contributions and remove the exception template on pages where they have
sole authorship or could reach consensus with all contributors.

After a few years, we could review any remaining pages with the NC
template and consider deleting them, rewriting them (hard to do as a
non-derivate work), or making a fresh attempt at approval from the
contributors for a license change.

[Dave Nielsen]

I'd like to avoid "another-CLS-event-with-a-jailed-up-wiki" too. What license should we use? CC-BY-SA seems reasonable, but I'm not an expert in these matters.

Dave

[David Strauss]

On Sun, 2011-01-16 at 17:39 -0800, Dave Nielsen wrote:
> I'd like to avoid "another-CLS-event-with-a-jailed-up-wiki" too. What
> license should we use? CC-BY-SA seems reasonable, but I'm not an
> expert in these matters.

In an overly simplistic comparison:

* CC-BY-SA ~= GPL
* CC-BY ~= BSD

I think either is reasonable.

[Dave Nielsen]

Thank you. That comparison helps a lot.

I found the "How to Attribute ..." article on Wikihow helpful too. I think I'd be happy with either one, but I'm just beginning to understand the ramifications.

Dave

[Van Riper]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 5:39 PM, Dave Nielsen <dnie...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'd like to avoid "another-CLS-event-with-a-jailed-up-wiki" too. What license should we use? CC-BY-SA seems reasonable, but I'm not an expert in these matters.

+1

Had no idea this was the case. Not an expert in these matters either, but, I am happy to work with others to get us out of jail.

--
Community Leadership Summit - 17th - 18th July 2010, Portland
http://www.communityleadershipsummit.com
Twitter: @CLSummit Hashtag: #cls10

[Jeff Osier-Mixon]

It seems to me that the goal is (1) to share the information and (2) to preserve the contributor's name for the sake of recognition. 

Is SA necessary?

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 5:39 PM, Dave Nielsen <dnie...@gmail.com> wrote:

[David Strauss]

SA ensures the work can't ever become proprietary without permission from every contributor.

[Mark Terranova]

I have session notes starting to roll in. I plan on posting most of them starting tomorrow (unless told otherwise.) There are a few folks I know (Ryan Singer, GK folks) that would like their stuff without NC restriction. I for one am posting the notes from my session on the TOSW and GK wiki (without NC) and including links on CLS wiki.

I have done numerous edits on both the regular and west wiki, and as a long time participant/advocate of Creative Commons , I apologize for my oversight on this. As a free culture advocate also, this whole thing is a roadbump that will allow us to learn, and more importantly avoid future hassles.

GK has been planning its 2011  CC offerings. I am now thinking of including our lessons from here for a Salon in Walnut Creek ( possibly elsewhere)

Any suggestions or objections to posting on the wiki would be appreciated, Im sorta in a holding pattern here :)

-Mark

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 10:16 AM, David Strauss <da...@davidstrauss.net> wrote:

SA ensures the work can't ever become proprietary without permission from every contributor.

Content can still be used 

[quaid]

On Jan 17, 12:48 pm, Mark Terranova <m...@gidgetkitchen.org> wrote:
> Any suggestions or objections to posting on the wiki would be appreciated,
> Im sorta in a holding pattern here :)

I put together this page with our steps:

http://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/wiki/index.php/License_changes_for_the_wiki

We need to start making noise about the change, then get Someone With
WikiSysop to change the license metadata for the site.

In the meantime, I guess I had to accept that the content I created
there is also under the NC, but I put in the summary that it is
intended to also be CC BY SA 3.0 Unported. (I quoted David from this
thread, he can put it officially on that page by removing the "" and
comment tag.)

We also need to define a process using the Talk page to track when all
or sufficient copyright holders have agreed to the new license for the
content.

- Karsten