@JanI,
Uh oh.
If you don't have explicit agreement from the contributor(s) to a page
concerning it being offered under a different license, either leave the
existing license or remove the content. Those are the only legally-sanitary
options for works still under copyright.
Declaring a work still in copyright to be orphaned does not give you permission
to republish it with a different license. Copyright doesn't work that way, not
merely in the US.
Secondly, the web site and wiki content were not, as far as I know, included in
the grant from Oracle. There has clearly been no objection, the domains were
transferred to the ASF, but technically that does not in any way change the
copyright status of any of the content. (The source-code grant, by the way,
did not transfer any copyright to the ASF. It simply provided a license to the
ASF that allowed the ASF to publish and make derivatives under its license.
Copyright in the original content continues to abide with Oracle.)
While casual treatment of this sort of thing succeeds in some situations, here
the interests and concerns of The Apache Software Foundation as a
public-interest entity come into play. It is expected that folks on Apache
projects will play nice with the intellectual property of others.
In particular,
2) We are allowed to copy the pages, with changes, and the new page can be
under a new license
is not ever automatically true. If there is already a license, the terms of
that license will determine what is possible with a derivative work ("with
changes"). Even copying is an exclusive right of the copyright holder, so the
license matters there too. In the absence of a license, (2) is not permitted
at all by anyone but the copyright holder or someone authorized by the
copyright holder (i.e., being licensed to do so).
Finally, and most important, making changes does not give anyone different
rights to the parts that survive from the original work. (Fine points about
license conditions apply here, but one should never assume that a legitimate
licensing of a derivative work has any impact on the IP interests in the
surviving content of the original work.)
- Dennis
-----Original Message-----
From: janI [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, June 5, 2013 09:02 AM
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Discuss][Wiki]"Synchronizing" (or not) localized wiki sites [was:
Fwd: [UserGuide]My "roadmap"]
[ ... ]
> > PDL is a sort of "copyleft" license.
>
> This is a excelent question. I ask to my self how the TDF did about
> (more) this question. Can we do like them? Simply overwrite the
> license and to continue the devel? (i remember when they copied all
> sites/docs/contents, like api site, and changed the license)
>
I have seen similar things happen in other wikis. The way forward seems to
be
1) announce the intention of changing license.
2) request contributors who do not agree, to remove their pages (we have
mail adresses on the users)
3) give contributors time to do it.
4) change license.
We should put the license in as part of "create user", as an "do you
accept", thereby we only have a problem with existing users.
> > Re-license those pages is not possible without the explicit consent of
> the
> > author, and those pages are so old that contact the authors is almost
> > impossible. Suppose we update those pages to point to the new material. A
> > potential contributor (or just a casual reader) will see the PDL notice
> on
> > the portal page, and no notice on the new pages: from the user
> perspective,
> > does this means that the new page is also under PDL? We know it isn't,
> but
> > this could be a cause of confusion, IMO. So, which is the best way to
> work
> > around this problem? Reimplement those pages, making a clear separation
> > between new material (under Apache) and legacy content?
>
> Maybe this is the unique way. By other hand, is a opportunity of
> review all content in the wiki, reorder and clean it, and evolve based
> in the correct license. In some cases, we can see the page history and
> try to find the author. Some parts, i believe that is all from
> Sun/Oracle copyright, so transfered to ASF.
>
A cleanup would be nice independent of which way we go
The word re-licensing is not a show stopper.
1) We are not obligated to store those pages for ever, we can, with notice,
delete the pages
2) We are allowed to copy the pages, with changes, and the new page can be
under a new license
rgds
jan I
>
> My 2ยข
> Claudio
>
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