license roadmap ? (was: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary)

Sun May 22 16:48:39 UTC 2005

On another hand, we are all talking like if re-licensing should be  
done right now in the blink of an eye... when we have time and we can  
do it slowly.

If we need something like a roadmap :

1. A good first step could be to enable dual-licensing as the default  
policy for new additions,

2. then to begin to authors of old-gfdl content to re-license their  
stuff,

3. and finally to replace gfdl-only content if necessary.

That would allow a slow but smooth process for relicensing. With  
adapted tagging, it could be a very good solution.

Jean-Baptiste Soufron

Le 22 mai 05 à 09:01, Brion Vibber a écrit :

> Robin Shannon wrote:
>
>> 2005/5/22, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net>:
>>
>>> Mozilla has been at this since 2001, apparently, and it looks  
>>> like they
>>> still have some non-relicensed code. They also inherited the  
>>> right to
>>> relicense all Netscape-owned code, which is presumably still a
>>> considerable portion. The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to  
>>> relicense
>>> content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere near  
>>> that.
>>> And while I don't know how many people have actually contributed  
>>> code to
>>> Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different level in terms  
>>> of sheer
>>> numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that the relicensing process
>>> would not scale very well, shall we say.
>>>
>>
>> from [[Netscape]]
>> "The Mozilla engineers decided to scrap the Communicator code and
>> start over from scratch"
>>
>
> To clear up any misunderstandings here: until very recently the  
> majority
> of work on Mozilla was done by programmers employed by Netscape/AOL to
> work on it, and that code was thus owned by Netscape/AOL whether or  
> not
> it dated back to the old Navigator or Communicator products.
>
> From the beginning, any contributions from third parties had to  
> grant a
> special license (Netscape Public Licence / Mozilla Public Licene)  
> which
> gave Netscape the right to include it in their proprietary
> Netscape-branded browser product as well as the open-source Mozilla
> releases.
>
> When the Mozilla project (then still headquartered at Netscape/AOL) a
> couple years later decided to add a GPL dual-license, Netscape/AOL was
> able to unilaterally change the license on code it outright owned. It
> was not able to do so on third-party submitted code for which only an
> NPL/MPL license was granted to them. For those third-party
> contributions, it was necessary to track down the authors and ask
> permission to change the license grant.
>
>
> We're similar to the Mozilla case in that we do not require third- 
> party
> contributors to assign copyright to us, so a licence change not
> specified for in the licenses already granted to us would require
> seeking permission from the contributor.
>
> We're *different* from the Mozilla case in two important ways:
> 1) There is very little material that is owned outright by the  
> Wikimedia
> Foundation, so virtually everything would require seeking permission.
>
> 2) We accept contributions with very little information on how to
> contact the author. We only rarely have e-mail addresses, and often  
> all
> we have is a pseudonym or the network address and time at which the  
> edit
>  was submitted. This makes it very hard for us to track down prior
> contributors to ask permission.
>
> </IANAL>
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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