On Sun, 2025-07-20 at 12:21 +0200, Taavi Väänänen wrote: > 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! Thank you for participating :) > > 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. I'm assuming you want the wiki to be attributed when its content is used elsewhere rather than a list of names that have edited each page (i.e. (c) Debian Wiki contributors)? If so, I agree with this notion. > > - 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. Weird that the website is trying to move towards 'Expat or GPL-2+'... [...] > > > - 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. +1 [...] > > > 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..) Personally, I'd prefer if we didn't migrate all content over, to ensure that content on the MediaWiki install is completely free to use and under a consistent license (as well as the content quality issues). From what I can tell, this is what happened when wiki.debian.net -> wiki.debian.org, where all content was copied over regardless of licensing concerns. -- Maytham
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