Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/wiki-licensing

• Created: 11/11/2005 by MatthewEast

• Contributors: MatthewEast, HenrikOmma, MatthewPaulThomas

• Packages affected: None.

Feel free to discuss this page on the [http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc Documentation Team mailing list] or at the bottom of the page.

Summary

The progress of the better-wiki-docs spec provides a good occasion to reevaluate the licensing of "documentation" that appears on the Ubuntu wiki. There is currently no licensing policy expressed on the wiki and this has caused confusion. This spec attempts to develop a licensing policy which ensures that material contributed to wiki pages can be used freely in Ubuntu Official Documentation, and elsewhere, without any copyright restrictions. It achieves this by ensuring that the material on the wiki is in the public domain.

Rationale

The wiki does not currently contain any express definition of licensing policy. This means:

There is confusion about whether material can or cannot be copied (for example into official Ubuntu documentation released in the distribution). ArguablyFootNote(It is probably true that people who post on the wiki can be taken to have impliedly waived their intellectual property rights of the material or alternatively have granted a licence to use the material freely by their conduct of posting to such a collaborative medium as a "wiki", but we don't want to have to get into these sort of arguments!), it can be, but "arguably" is not good enough, we need clarity, for the Documentation Team, for the contributors and for the users.

There is therefore a need to avoid [http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2005-November/004222.html this sort of confusion] and establish a licensing policy which enables material posted on the wiki to be freely modified and redistributed to reflect the fact that the wiki is a collaborative effort by all the community.

Users should not be allowed to post under other licences for two reasons:

1. the wiki should be a collaborative effort, users who wish to retain copyright are free to publish material on their own sites;
2. it would be difficult to implement a system where copyrighted material is conveniently locked down to prevent editing by others.

A related but in reality discrete issue is whether the wiki documentation should discourage author attribution. Documentation is generally not helped by having the author's name on the top, which can in fact be distracting. On the wiki, it can also deter others from contributing to a page. Where others have contributed, it is impossible to keep track of all the contributors in a long list of authors. For these reasons we have concluded that the general policy should be against author attribution on the pages.

Use cases

• Chiara works on the [http://doc.ubuntu.com Ubuntu Documentation Team]. She is writing a section of the [:DesktopGuide:Ubuntu Desktop Starter Guide] about multimedia support. She would like to use the material from the wiki page MultimediaApplications, but is unsure of whether she will be breaching copyright by doing so.

• Anthony wants to work on the Ubuntu Wiki by contributing a guide, but is only prepared to do so on the basis that he retains copyright in the work and he wishes to find out whether this is possible on the Ubuntu wiki.

Design

• Make the material on the wiki available in the public domain.
• Make the user who contributes material to the wiki aware of this fact.

Implementation

• Prepare for the transition by attempting to obtain the consent of persons who have posted material on the wiki. This will be done as follows: an email will be prepared to explain the reasons behind the transition, and to encourage any users who disagree to come forward to discuss and resolve any potential problems. This email will be sent to those users who have posted to the wiki since it has been running on moin (a script will be necessary to get a list of those users with their email addresses from the Launchpad authentication and wiki databases). The email should also be sent to the main ubuntu mailing lists, and in general the information should be distributed widely. Then, after a reasonable period, the following things will be done:

• A licence like this will be put on a prominently linked wiki page, or in the footer:

  You are free to copy, modify, distribute, display and make commercial use of material which you find on this wiki. See the [LINK Creative Commons Public Domain License]

• Further or alternatively, add the details to [http://www.ubuntu.com/legal the website legal page] and link to it from prominent areas of the wiki.

• Some Moin code will be added to make it clear that when creating, editing and/or saving a page the user knows that the material added is put into the public domain, by displaying the following message:

  Please note: By submitting your contribution, you accept that you are dedicating it to the public domain and retain no copyright in the material. If you are copying material from another source, please ensure you have the right to do so under these terms.

Outstanding issues

None