Re: simplest copyleft license for a wiki
bts@alum.mit.edu (Brian T. Sniffen) writes:
> I don't think you want to say "You can change the license" -- perhaps
> you want to say "You may also choose to receive this under the terms
> of any other copyleft license, such as the GNU GPL, CreativeCommons
> ShareAlike, or XEmacs Manual License".
Thanks; noted.
> But even then, you're going to have two problems: consider, for example,
> the "BSD Preservation License" -- it's a copyleft which prohibits any
> use of copyleft licenses in conjunction with the work, so the ability
> to derive commercial works is always preserved. Is that something you
> want to count as a copyleft?
Hm, maybe that is up to the courts to decide. It doesn't look like a
copyleft to me, but that's just my first impression. I'm used to this
definition from the FSF site:
Copyleft is a general method for making a program free software
and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to
be free software as well.
Can you point me to an URL with the license text? I didn't find it
with Google.
> Also consider that derivative works under the GFDL or GPL will not be
> mergeable with the root: those changes won't be useful to you.
We know this and accept the problem. At the moment the FDL presents
similar problems, however, since when a page gets into the Emacs
manual, and is edited there, we cannot take it back without copying
all the invariants from the Emacs manual, and adding these to the
blurbs we have at various places on the wiki.
> Restated, the two problems, with solutions, are:
>
> 1. "Any copyleft license" is a very broad and fuzzy set. It's not
> appropriate for a legal document. Pick some small number of
> copyleft licenses ("1" is nice) you like, and make it available
> under those.
I wanted to leave this "broad and fuzzy" on purpose, because I want
the wiki to be "forward compatible" to any copyleft license that might
appear in the future.
Why do you think it is not appropriate for a legal document? I have
heard a friend with a law PhD here in Switzerland say that a broad and
fuzzy text is just as appropriate for legal texts, because then the
court will examine the intents of the wording, and interpret it
according to the situation at hand. In other words, he felt it was a
simple and flexible alternative. He also felt that people where
over-regulating things. In reality, that is often not required.
Based on that, I was hoping to write something really simple.
I'd love to see an example of a case that failed because the license
was too fuzzy... The problem with the current legal system seems to
be that people hire lawyers to examine legal documents, and since they
are being paid, they will work on the legal documents but nobody
really knows whether the regal risk actually diminished or not.
> 2. Most copyleft licenses are not compatible with each other, because
> they treat the requirements of the other license as non-free.
> Because you're writing mostly about Emacs, I'd suggest sticking
> with something GPL compatible, so you can have source code
> trivially on the Wiki: that limits you pretty much to the GPL or
> MIT/X11 licenses.
This is where our problems already start, because the wiki contains
both text and code, so perhaps we'd need both the GPL and the FDL and
then my head starts hurting again... :)
Back when I started the wiki, I tried to do the braindead thing: The
Emacs manual was using the FDL, so the wiki would be using the FDL,
too. (I had a discussion with RMS and some friends at the time where
I claimed that the FDL was just too complex, but my suggestion of a
simpler new "Free Website License" which I wrote back then did not
convince him.)
As time passed, I started to note additional problems which I tried to
explain away at first, but when I reread some of the messages in the
debian-legal archives, I decided to finally do something about it...
So I guess the only big issue in this posting is the question of
whether "Any copyleft license" is "not appropriate for a legal
document." If I really need more precise (and complex) wording, then
maybe I will stick to the XEmacs manual license which is longer, but
copyleft enough for me. That would be something along these lines:
# Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of
these pages provided the copyright notice and this permission notice
are preserved on all copies.
# Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of
these pages under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that
the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of
a permission notice identical to this one.
# Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of these
pages into another language, under the above conditions for modified
versions.
The drawbacks of the above list of three items is that it doesn't
mention the preferred form for making modifications, and it doesn't
mention the permission to upgrade to other such licenses. Oh well.
Alex.
--
.O. http://www.emacswiki.org/alex/
..O Schroeder's first law:
OOO The coffee at the office shall taste terrible.
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