WikiLicensing

Revision 8 as of 2005-11-12 02:37:30

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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.

Rationale

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

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, while retaining attribution rights which are proportionate to the fact that the wiki is a collaborative effort by all the community.

We also need to consider whether to permit users to derogate from the licences: if a user wants to write a page on the wiki but retain copyright over it, should he be allowed to do so? My view on this is no, for reasons of principle (the wiki should be a collaborative effort, users who wish to retain copyright are free to publish material on their own sites) and practicality (it would be difficult to implement a system where copyrighted material is conveniently locked down to prevent editing by others).

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

I believe that the best design in order to achieve the objectives stated above is to write a license for the wiki like this: 

You are free:

 * to copy, modify, distribute, display and make commercial use of material which you find on this wiki

Under the following conditions:

 * You must identify that the material came from the Ubuntu wiki, and provide a URL to the wiki.
 * If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.
 * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the licence terms of this work.

The above license is the simple version of the creative commons attribution-sharealike 2.0 license, with some modifications to ensure that specific author attribution is not necessary.

Implementation

  • Release a wiki page with the details of the licensing plan detailed in the Design section above.

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

  • link to the policy from the wiki footer?
  • We could add some Moin code to make it more clear: when creating, editing and/or saving a page we could notify the user of the licensing terms.

Outstanding issues