Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2018, at 10:11 AM, Daniel Stone wrote:
> Sorry for the lack of reply, I've been quite busy lately. I also don't
> have a great answer for you. We cannot post-hoc enforce a licence on
> content: anything that is there is copyright to the actual author. We
> can enforce a licence on new content, but relicensing the existing
> content is quite a time-consuming process: first finding who wrote it
> in the first place, and then getting in contact with them. The former
> is difficult because we have moved from twiki -> MoinMoin -> ikiwiki,
> in most cases losing history. We can find the history, but it takes a
> lot of time. Secondly, this content dates back in some cases to 2004,
> and contacting people after 14 years is notoriously difficult.

I have seen other projects tackle relicensing by *attempting* to contact all contributors and explicitly giving some timeout - "if we don't receive any objections in a month, we'll go ahead". This seems like a sensible compromise - most people don't care about the licensing of two sentences they wrote on a wiki five years ago.

Of course, finding the list of contributors and valid email addresses for each one would still be quite a lot of work, but that strategy makes it a manageable amount rather than a crazy amount.

Is the history from the previous wiki systems preserved somewhere?