FAIwiki - proposal for an other License but Creative Commons - was: Re: FAIwiki Copyrights

[Henning Sprang]

On Mon, 2005-08-08 at 14:00 +0100, Dominik Kasprzyk wrote:
> Firstly, it seems to me there's two different issues with the wiki copyright.
>   The first is that there will be documentation information on how FAI should
>  be used, how to fix problems etc and the second seems to be example code for
>  FAI scripts.
> 
> Would it be too wrong for me to suggest that we separate these two different 
> purposes with two different licences?
>   Because the Creative Commons licence
>  seems fairly reasonable to me in terms of documentation but too restrictive
>  for code, yet it would be nice to have some control over the documentation
>  information we each contribute.

The only idea how to do that would be add a copyright disclaimer to
every single page of the wiki, and that is not very effective.
Do you really think we need a dual license model?

The creative commons was just a proposal made by me because there was
absolutely no other proposal by anybody else, just critics that the wiki
cannot be used without having a clearly defined license. And creative
commons was just the first I got in my hands when looking for a license
that could be used for software documentation, with the very limited
time I had so spare for that issue. It was more or less a random pick,
which proved to be completely useless, and I am completely not
interested in using it further.

As said in another mail, in the meantime I believe GPL is the only
useful license, especially after the things Julia pointed out and I
already changed the wiki license to that - nobody wants to automatically
break laws when pasting FAI code into the wiki, right?

Another change will only be made by me if there are some very important
and valid arguments against that. But in the end, the copyright page is
a wiki page, you can change it yourself (which leads to the question if
these copyright remarks have any value at all in the wiki).

> 
> Actually, the only real issue I can think where copyright really affects
>  documentation in a way significantly differently than the code is if FAI
>  became popular enough that a book were to be published for profit from
>  information on the wiki on how to use it.  
> 
> 				Dominik.
> 
> P.S.  Henning Sprang, as you seem to be more or less chairman of this discussion,
>  I'll leave it to you to foward to legal or not if you think it's interesting or relevant.


As for the crossposting: I think cross posting is confusing as it seems
not to be sure that replies reach us here. (proof: look at the list
archive of debian legal, there are some more replies to our thread, and
they didn't make it here, maybe because of the spam filtering issues
Thomas explained). So if somebody feels like he needs to make sure that
the FAIwiki license is considered good by debian-legal, he should
probably subscribe to that list, ask and discuss with them (after asking
the FAI crowd what they want), and report the results back to us here.

As for me being the chairman of the FAI wiki copyright discussion:

Please do not consider me the chairman of the wiki copyright discussion.
I only volunteered for and did set up the wiki technically, which is
done now. At the first day after the release I saw some remarks in it,
on the disclaimer page saying "here is no copyright information, this
suxx". And because nobody else did, I started this discussion here, to
finally get to a wiki where everybody wants and can work. As this turns
out to become a bigger and more complex issue as I ever imagined ( or
maybe I did and therefore I try not to engange in political and legal
stuff) - at least if you want to do it _really_ right - my resources of
energy and time that I can use on that, are nearly empty soon, so there
will be actually a need that those people who care about that stuff and
interested in licensing and law stuff help solving that, if there is
some doubt that the way I defined the wiki license by now is correct. If
nobody will jump in to help, also my work of doing the technical stuff
will be just for the trashcan, but I see no way to change that.


Henning

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