Re: Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Sun, May 6, 2018, at 3:36 PM, Daniel Stone wrote:
> OK, done now.

Thanks! By digging into that, I confirmed that Federico is the sole author of 
the file manager interface spec that kicked off this discussion. A couple of 
people, myself included, have adjusted formatting since the transition to 
ikiwiki, but that's not a creative work. I've emailed Federico to ask about 
licensing, and I'll let you know when he responds.

I've also built a list of which users edited which page on the MoinMoin wiki, 
to make it easier to do this for other pages:
https://gitlab.com/takluyver/xdg-moinmoin-archaeology/blob/master/page_editors.json

This data would have been public when that version of the wiki was live, and 
the equivalent data is public for the current wiki, so I don't think there can 
be any privacy concerns. I haven't re-published the raw wiki data I generated 
it from, in case that has some sensitive info, but anyone with access to 
annarchy.freedesktop.org can get the raw data if they want to check. The repo 
contains two notebooks with the code I used to put that list together.

Thomas

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Re: Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Sun, May 6, 2018, at 1:56 PM, Daniel Stone wrote:
> The wiki doesn't run on MoinMoin anymore. All the wiki content is

I'm trying to get the history - a lot of the wiki pages in the current system 
were converted from moin, so that old data is needed to try to work out who 
wrote them. Sorry for not explaining that clearly enough.
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Re: Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On 5 May 2018 at 18:50, Thomas Kluyver  wrote:
> I have found where the Moinmoin data is located 
> (/srv/www.freedesktop.org/moin/data on annarchy.freedesktop.org). Could 
> someone add me (takluyver) to the www-data group so I can investigate it 
> further? Or you could make all that data world-readable.

The wiki doesn't run on MoinMoin anymore. All the wiki content is
publicly accessible here:
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wiki/

> On Sat, May 5, 2018, at 6:00 PM, Thomas Kluyver wrote:
>> I also stole about 30 sheets of toilet paper from a hotel a few weeks
>> ago. Please, someone explain property law to me!
>>
>> More seriously, it's clear that my proposed solution is not going to
>> fly, because we're taking copyright Very Seriously. Since we are taking
>> copyright Very Seriously, there are two problems:

Yes, we are because we have to.

>> 1. No-one can copy code samples from the wiki, or redistribute
>> specifications or anything, because they don't have a license. This is
>> what the thread was originally about, and it seems like a pretty major
>> flaw for a body making interoperability specifications for open source
>> software.

Most specifications are _not_ hosted on the wiki, but are hosted here:
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/

Some of those specifications have licenses, others do not. For those
without licenses, it would be good to fix that by getting the content
properly licensed by agreement of the contributors.

>> 2. Whoever runs freedesktop.org is violating all the contributors'
>> copyright by redistributing the content they created, because you're not
>> asked to grant a license when you edit the wiki.
>>
>> Is anybody interested in fixing this? Do we even have a record of who
>> edited what before the wiki was migrated to its current form?
>>
>> If you think we can live with the ambiguous copyright situation as it
>> is, then you weren't really taking copyright law Very Seriously, you
>> were just picking an argument with me for trying to suggest a solution.

Personally, yes, I am very interested in seeing the situation fixed
and regularised. Roughly in order, the steps to fix that would be:
  * agree with people who currently and regularly contribute, or who
have made substantial contributions in the past, what the new license
should be
  * declare this new license as required for new pages
  * contact the authors of old wiki pages and specifications, seeking
their approval to relicense content
  * tracking content which has not been relicensed and deciding at
some later stage whether to rewrite it, jettison it, or maintain it
with the old 'implicit' disclaimer

I don't have any time to do this, but will happily support anyone who
is interested in doing it, so long as it doesn't involve having to put
up with pointlessly sarcastic sniping.

Cheers,
Daniel
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Re: Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Simon Lees]

On 06/05/18 21:25, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, May 06, 2018 05:49:15 AM Simon Lees wrote:
>> if I wrote anything on the wiki which I don't think I did I would be
>> more then happy for it to be relicensed under a BSD/MIT style license
>> but would be less happy to allow because I don't think its the right
>> license for the task.
> 
> allow ___???

Sorry this is what happens when you get interrupted by kids, I was
probably going to put some form of gpl in that blank as an example, but
there are many different licenses I could list there instead.

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Re: Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[rhkramer]

On Sunday, May 06, 2018 05:49:15 AM Simon Lees wrote:
> if I wrote anything on the wiki which I don't think I did I would be
> more then happy for it to be relicensed under a BSD/MIT style license
> but would be less happy to allow because I don't think its the right
> license for the task.

allow ___???
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Re: Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Simon Lees]

On 06/05/18 20:06, Thomas Kluyver wrote:
> On Sun, May 6, 2018, at 10:49 AM, Simon Lees wrote:
>> The only way that I think we can realistically make the wiki situation
>> better is by changing it now to say new changes are under the following
>> license, then in 10 years hope that enough of the content has been
>> changed that someone can delete all the remaining non licensed content
>> then get someone else to fill in any gaps. 
> 
> I'm hoping it might also be possible to work at the level of individual 
> pages: find everyone who has contributed to a page and get their agreement to 
> put a license on it. In combination with agreeing a license for new changes, 
> of course.
> 
That might work for the most part, then at least we'd just end up with a
list of pages / sections of pages that need to be rewritten.

>>  If we were to go with the suggestion I wrote above
>> there are many others who could make that change easier then myself who
>> has no access. 
> 
> Do you know who these people are? Part of what makes this tricky is that I 
> don't even know who can do admin stuff on the wiki.

Unfortunately not, I only started having an interest in this area over
the last couple of years.
> 
>> Either way if something is going to change there needs to be more
>> discussion yet as no one has agreed on which license we would use, which
>> you need to decide before contacting previous contributors.
> 
> OK, let's try to move that forwards. I propose that we use the MIT license 
> for any code on the wiki, and CC-BY for text and any other non-code content. 
> These are equivalent in spirit, but MIT is written for source code.
> 
Id agree that's reasonable.

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Re: Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Sun, May 6, 2018, at 10:49 AM, Simon Lees wrote:
> The only way that I think we can realistically make the wiki situation
> better is by changing it now to say new changes are under the following
> license, then in 10 years hope that enough of the content has been
> changed that someone can delete all the remaining non licensed content
> then get someone else to fill in any gaps. 

I'm hoping it might also be possible to work at the level of individual pages: 
find everyone who has contributed to a page and get their agreement to put a 
license on it. In combination with agreeing a license for new changes, of 
course.

>  If we were to go with the suggestion I wrote above
> there are many others who could make that change easier then myself who
> has no access. 

Do you know who these people are? Part of what makes this tricky is that I 
don't even know who can do admin stuff on the wiki.

> Either way if something is going to change there needs to be more
> discussion yet as no one has agreed on which license we would use, which
> you need to decide before contacting previous contributors.

OK, let's try to move that forwards. I propose that we use the MIT license for 
any code on the wiki, and CC-BY for text and any other non-code content. These 
are equivalent in spirit, but MIT is written for source code.

Thomas
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Re: Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Simon Lees]

On 06/05/18 17:40, Thomas Kluyver wrote:
> On Sun, May 6, 2018, at 8:40 AM, Simon Lees wrote:
>> Anyone
>> who goes to the effort of editing a wiki knows and acknowledges that the
>> content they have produced will be displayed on the wiki in its current
>> form and are therefore giving permission for the content they have
>> created to be redistributed by the wiki in its current form.
> 
> I'm fine with this 'implicit license' approach, but it's precisely the sort 
> of grey area that other people insisted cannot possibly be allowed.
> 
I am only fine with the 'implicit license' approach for the one area I
mentioned (being distributed on the original wiki with the same access
that existed at the time of writing. Unless someone can point me to a
precedent that does otherwise.

> It's frustrating that people have the time and energy to argue about 
> copyright, but nobody seems to be interested in doing anything to improve the 
> wiki.
> 

The only way that I think we can realistically make the wiki situation
better is by changing it now to say new changes are under the following
license, then in 10 years hope that enough of the content has been
changed that someone can delete all the remaining non licensed content
then get someone else to fill in any gaps. (Note the person deleting the
content really needs to be different from the people writing the new
content, technically the people writing the new content probably should
have never read the old content).

I personally don't think any other approach is going to work, yes it
sucks, which is why i'm not spending time on it. (but I won't stop you
if you want to). If we were to go with the suggestion I wrote above
there are many others who could make that change easier then myself who
has no access. Where as contributing to this mailing list thread has
taken not much more then 10 minutes of my Sunday afternoon.

Either way if something is going to change there needs to be more
discussion yet as no one has agreed on which license we would use, which
you need to decide before contacting previous contributors. For example
if I wrote anything on the wiki which I don't think I did I would be
more then happy for it to be relicensed under a BSD/MIT style license
but would be less happy to allow because I don't think its the right
license for the task.

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Re: Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Sun, May 6, 2018, at 8:40 AM, Simon Lees wrote:
> Anyone
> who goes to the effort of editing a wiki knows and acknowledges that the
> content they have produced will be displayed on the wiki in its current
> form and are therefore giving permission for the content they have
> created to be redistributed by the wiki in its current form.

I'm fine with this 'implicit license' approach, but it's precisely the sort of 
grey area that other people insisted cannot possibly be allowed.

It's frustrating that people have the time and energy to argue about copyright, 
but nobody seems to be interested in doing anything to improve the wiki.

Thomas
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Re: Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Simon Lees]

On 06/05/18 02:30, Thomas Kluyver wrote:
> I also stole about 30 sheets of toilet paper from a hotel a few weeks ago. 
> Please, someone explain property law to me!
> 
> More seriously, it's clear that my proposed solution is not going to fly, 
> because we're taking copyright Very Seriously. Since we are taking copyright 
> Very Seriously, there are two problems:
> 
> 1. No-one can copy code samples from the wiki, or redistribute specifications 
> or anything, because they don't have a license. This is what the thread was 
> originally about, and it seems like a pretty major flaw for a body making 
> interoperability specifications for open source software.
> 2. Whoever runs freedesktop.org is violating all the contributors' copyright 
> by redistributing the content they created, because you're not asked to grant 
> a license when you edit the wiki.
> 
I am no legal expert and hence my wording may not be legally correct but
the idea behind it stands. I suspect your #2 here is a non issue. Anyone
who goes to the effort of editing a wiki knows and acknowledges that the
content they have produced will be displayed on the wiki in its current
form and are therefore giving permission for the content they have
created to be redistributed by the wiki in its current form. If you were
to take a private wiki and make its contents public then you have an
issue because it was not reasonable for authors to expect that the
content they created would become publicly available.

If this did not hold then the issue would extend beyond wiki's into
bugtrackers, forums etc

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