On 7/20/25 5:16 AM, Maytham Alsudany wrote: > The wiki is still under no clear license, and /copyright.html just links > to the discussion pages on licensing that have since gone stale. So > let's start working on this again. Thank you for starting this! > The last points that were discussed can be found at [1]. > > Which license should be selected to cover the wiki? > > - Public domain / CC Zero? > Means content can be used everywhere, it gives the most freedom. I have a preference for something that includes at least an attribution requirement. > - Expat (MIT) > This is currently what www.debian.org is trying to migrate to AFAICT. The license text here specifically refers to "software", and wiki contents is not software. So given there are also suitable free licenses (e.g. the Creative Commons family) that's specifically designed for non-software works, I would prefer to use those instead. > - GFDL > I think that this is not a DFSG-compliant license unless only the > base is used without any of the cover extensions. The Arch Wiki > uses this though. Seems there's strong disagreement for this license > though in the previous discussions. The GFDL has some other practical problems as well, for example IHMO the requirement to include the full GFDL text with > - CC-BY 4.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0 or another CC license > I think these are DFSG-compliant as long as non-commerical ones > aren't used. Wikipedia uses CC-BY-SA 4.0 The non-commercial (NC) and no-derivatives (ND) variants are non-free. That leaves the CC BY (Attribution) and CC BY-SA (Attribution ShareAlike) variants as options for us. CC BY-SA is my preferred choice. > And then would this license cover all existing content that doesn't > explicitly state its license? Or would it apply only to new content? I agree with Aurélien that we can not unilaterally decide a new license for content where the copyright is held by someone else. > If it cannot be applied to existing content, then could the new > MediaWiki have this license and it would be up to contributors to ensure > that what they are putting is correctly licensed? We could configure the MediaWiki install to say "Content is licensed under $LICENSE unless otherwise noted", or something similar to that effect. And then we could create some template to add to imported pages explaining that they were imported from the old wiki and their licensing status is unclear. (That's of course assuming we import any content in the first place; the extremely-cautious-about-copyright part of me wants to note that copying content with no explicit license from one wiki to an another is questionable at best..) Taavi
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