Re: simplest copyleft license for a wiki
Alex Schroeder <alex@emacswiki.org> writes:
> emacswiki.org uses the FDL at the moment; I'd like to move away from
> the FDL to a very simple license I can understand in two minutes, and
> I want to allow people to "upgrade" to the FDL, the GPL, the Creative
> Commons ShareAlike (CC SA) license, the XEmacs manual license, or any
> other copyleft license when they copy text from the wiki. At the
> moment it is possible to convert the entire wiki into a big monolithic
> HTML file, which can be distributed by other channels. Furthermore,
> code samples from the wiki might be useful additions to both the
> Emacs and the XEmacs manual.
>
> I'm looking for some advice concerning the wording of the following
> license. The goal is to keep this license as short as possible while
> still making it a copyleft license upgradable to any of the other
> licenses.
>
> 1. You have the right to copy, modify, and/or distribute the work.
>
> 2. You must grant recipients the same rights.
>
> 3. You must inform recipients of their rights.
>
> 4. When you distribute the work, you must provide the recipients
> access to the preferred form for making copies and
> modifications, for no more than your costs of doing so.
>
> 5. Recipients must place identical restrictions on derivative
> works.
>
> 6. You may change the license to any other copyleft licsense such
> as the GPL, GFDL, CC SA, or the XEmacs manual license.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
-Brian
--
Brian T. Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/
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