Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 5 May 2018 at 18:50, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> I have found where the Moinmoin data is located (/srv/www.freedesktop.org/moin/data on annarchy.freedesktop.org). Could someone add me (takluyver) to the www-data group so I can investigate it further? Or you could make all that data world-readable.

The wiki doesn't run on MoinMoin anymore. All the wiki content is
publicly accessible here:
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wiki/

> On Sat, May 5, 2018, at 6:00 PM, 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:

Yes, we are because we have to.

>> 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.

Most specifications are _not_ hosted on the wiki, but are hosted here:
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/

Some of those specifications have licenses, others do not. For those
without licenses, it would be good to fix that by getting the content
properly licensed by agreement of the contributors.

>> 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.
>>
>> Is anybody interested in fixing this? Do we even have a record of who
>> edited what before the wiki was migrated to its current form?
>>
>> If you think we can live with the ambiguous copyright situation as it
>> is, then you weren't really taking copyright law Very Seriously, you
>> were just picking an argument with me for trying to suggest a solution.

Personally, yes, I am very interested in seeing the situation fixed
and regularised. Roughly in order, the steps to fix that would be:
  * agree with people who currently and regularly contribute, or who
have made substantial contributions in the past, what the new license
should be
  * declare this new license as required for new pages
  * contact the authors of old wiki pages and specifications, seeking
their approval to relicense content
  * tracking content which has not been relicensed and deciding at
some later stage whether to rewrite it, jettison it, or maintain it
with the old 'implicit' disclaimer

I don't have any time to do this, but will happily support anyone who
is interested in doing it, so long as it doesn't involve having to put
up with pointlessly sarcastic sniping.

Cheers,
Daniel