licence for wiki material (or lack thereof): a desperate plea
Hello,
We're catching the tail-end of discussions about Debian's up-coming
official wiki at <http://wiki.debian.org/>, specifically, the migration
of material from the unofficial wiki at <http://wiki.debian.net/>.
I'd like to raise the issue of wiki material licencing before it gets
too late to do anything about it.
Currently, most wikis do not express any licence regarding the material
they provide: there is no clear indication how the material might be
re-used (e.g. incorporating into debian's official documents) or what
terms people can contribute under.
wiki.debian.net has a retro-fitted copyright statement at
<http://wiki.debian.net/copyright.html> which states only that the
copyright is held by 'each author'. There is also a condition of
publishing (namely, re-use, Fair Use). This isn't linked to from the
edit form (can't confirm whilst it's read-only) so you are only likely
to find this if you look for it.
A piece of software which was released without any indication of licence
would never be considered as a package for debian. I would not like to
see anything produced by the wiki to be discounted in a similar way: it
might be that the wiki proves to be a very useful tool for writing
replacements for GFDL documents for example.
It is possible with some wiki technologies to incorporate both a
human-aimed indication of licence (all contributions must be made
according to these terms...) and a machine-readable indication in the
form of licence metadata. I've hacked GPLv2 metadata into mediawiki, for
example (proof of concept at <http://wiki.debianflame.org/>).
I am happy to work on how to do this with moin moin but I need to know
that others agree this is necessary. Is the current statement on
wiki.debian.net sufficient? In which case we need to add it to the .org
one too.
It would really need to be done before any material starts getting added
(i.e., before the private discussions about content migration from .net
to .org were started). We'd also need to decide on a licence for
material. I'd suggest GPLv2, in order to be compatible with e.g. the new
maintainer's guide, the developer's reference, etc.
[With apologies for the length]
--
Jon Dowland
http://jon.dowland.name/
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