Re: a desperate request for licence metadata (was Re: migrating wiki content from twiki (w.d.net) to moinmoin (w.d.org))
Jon Dowland wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 01:08:00PM +0200, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña
> wrote:
>
>>Based on the text on the w.d.o frontpage it seems that Michael Ivey
>>has provided the tar.gz with all the w.d.n contents.
>
>
> I would like to make a desperate plee that some attempt is made to
> incorporate a clear indication of the licence under which material on
> this wiki is available under, either with a user-readable prompt or
> machine-readable metadata (ideally both).
>
> This is something you really can't retrofit onto a wiki once significant
> contributions are made.
While I agree that this is something best done before hand, it can
and has been successfully retrofitted into at least some wikis. The
WLUG wiki changed the licensing on their wiki, and found none of the
problems insurmountable.
The biggest problem was some of the authors wanted to do things
"properly" and in at least one case (i.e. me) this involved getting
the sign-off from my line-manager at work. Some pages had to be
re-written, but that's always the case in a wiki anyway. The whole
process is described at:
http://www.wlug.org.nz/WlugWikiRelicensing
cheers
stuart
--
Stuart Yeates stuart.yeates@oucs.ox.ac.uk
OSS Watch http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/
Work Blog http://blog.educause.edu/StuartYeates/
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