I was merely asking if anyone had given a thought to the question of legal
issues and how they relate to Wiki + ASF. I think that it is a reasonable
question, and I was surprised that no one had raised this issue. Audit
trail...?
The same issues are in the wiki as are in the CVS repository and with
Bugzilla. Anyone could do the things
you say. Is there an audit train, go look. hit Recent changes. The
thing about the wiki is we just delete inapporpriate
content.
Wiki's have a long and proud history and so far as I know have NEVER
gotten anyone sued.
It is important to keep reminding yourself that Apache is a corporation of
Delaware, and it is subject to real IP law. If you've been watching some of
the dev lists I've been watching, there have been some small copyright
violations of late that, luckily, have been settled amicably.This
coupled with the fact that ASF wants to start raising more operational funds
(Attachment A, November board minutes), makes legal questions very
important. I'd ask you to look up the word indemnity, and meditate. You
want FUD? Open source software has *very* well funded enemies. :-(
Right, however I don't see how this is any different. Anyone can post
an illegal patch into bugzilla with relative
ease. If that little password thing makes you comfortable, go get a
yahoo address with a fake name and post
the secret sauce in a patch.
I call this FUD because you're concerned with something that hasn't ever
happened before (as far as I know, please
point me to a case if you know otherwise), Ward Cunningham has been
running a wiki for like 10 years or so, you're
concerned with something highly correctable (easily deleteable content).
And lastly the main threat on an Apache wiki is that someone posts
something
from a book on an Apache topic. Somehow I doubt the publisher of such a
book would want to shut Apache down (kinda
hard for them to sell books that way). Any other IP would probably be
too off topic and would probably be deleted just by
WTF does that have to do with anything... (Not that I think we should
be too strict).
So by the well funded enemies I must presume you mean Microsoft
primarily. Yes if they are our enemy that is a problem indeed.
It seems like something that is particularly remediable. We should seek
their friendship and work on getting some .NET projects
started.
PS: You are right about Wiki's effective self regulation, I'm astonished
that Wikipedia still adheres to the neutrality policy on topics that deal
with current events - (if only major world conflicts could be settled on
Wiki?). I started a Wikipedia page on Jakarta, it is sparse, and hardly
accurate SO FIX IT: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakarta_Project
Notice how expansive that wikipedia is? I would presume that
Britannica and friends have a vested interest in not seeing it grow.
AFAIK they have yet to be sued.
Bottom line, we can be sued for anyhthing, there are things that are of
greater risk (hosting source code for instance, I'm sure by now
'IF' statements violate someone's patent somewhere). Wikis have a
proven long track record, and I would rather NOT argue legal
issues with software developers. Its a big fat waste of time. This
isn't a comment on your worth as a human being or whatever, just
IANAL and AFAIK you aren't either, so we both don't know WTF we're
talking about which leads to a conversation of pure conjecture
and speculation which has no logical conclusion. If you honestly feel
this is going to be a problem (despite it never having happened in the
history of the net so far google is aware of), its your right,
responsibility and duty to bring it to the boards attention.
-jAndy.NET
Tim O'Brien
-Original Message-
From: Andrew C. Oliver [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, December 20, 2002 8:26 PM
To: Jakarta General List
Subject: Re: ACTION not WORDS Re: A Jakarta wiki?
O'brien, Tim wrote:
A non-member, non-commiter, doc patch submitter with three questions
here,
Would this Wiki be limited to those with commit status?
If not, how does this jive with the whole merit-based Apache-way?
Does a public wiki have any legal ramifications for ASF? If Wiki is
open to the public and someone puts GPL'd or copyrighted material on
Wiki, who would bear responsibility?
Lets not start with the FUD.. If it happens, we'll remove them.
What if someone puts the detailed information on how to
produce Anthrax,
and hides the
secret location of Osama Bin Ladin in a patch submitted which also
brilliantly makes Velocity run 300x faster than it does
currently so that we have to choose between making the CIA happy or
velocity running fast...
Wiki's self regulate. You'll see.
Lets not What if problems that don't exist. Go see
http://www.wikipedia.org/ and http://c2.com/cgi/wiki to see
what can happen and on what scale, without those things being
a problem...
Lets be
