Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

Simon Lees sflees at suse.de
Sun May 6 07:40:43 UTC 2018



On 06/05/18 02:30, Thomas Kluyver wrote:
> I also stole about 30 sheets of toilet paper from a hotel a few weeks ago. Please, someone explain property law to me!
> 
> More seriously, it's clear that my proposed solution is not going to fly, because we're taking copyright Very Seriously. Since we are taking copyright Very Seriously, there are two problems:
> 
> 1. No-one can copy code samples from the wiki, or redistribute specifications or anything, because they don't have a license. This is what the thread was originally about, and it seems like a pretty major flaw for a body making interoperability specifications for open source software.
> 2. Whoever runs freedesktop.org is violating all the contributors' copyright by redistributing the content they created, because you're not asked to grant a license when you edit the wiki.
> 
I am no legal expert and hence my wording may not be legally correct but
the idea behind it stands. I suspect your #2 here is a non issue. Anyone
who goes to the effort of editing a wiki knows and acknowledges that the
content they have produced will be displayed on the wiki in its current
form and are therefore giving permission for the content they have
created to be redistributed by the wiki in its current form. If you were
to take a private wiki and make its contents public then you have an
issue because it was not reasonable for authors to expect that the
content they created would become publicly available.

If this did not hold then the issue would extend beyond wiki's into
bugtrackers, forums etc

-- 

Simon Lees (Simotek)                            http://simotek.net

Emergency Update Team                           keybase.io/simotek
SUSE Linux                           Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30
GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

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