[Ns-developers] copyright for wiki text

[Tom Henderson]

sam at meta.net.nz wrote:
> We went through this process with the Waikato Linux Users Group wiki, 
> which has a large amount of content in it. The comittee members 
> eventually decided on a Creative Commons license. Have a look at:
> 
> http://www.wlug.org.nz/WlugWikiLicense
> 
> For further information.
> 
> Cheers,
> Sam
> 

Reviving this thread...

It seems that there are two issues with the wiki (and perhaps the 
documentation in general): copyright and license.

Regarding copyright, Lloyd suggested some kind of transfer to a 
foundation, but we don't have one in place.  However, we do not require 
such copyright transfer for source code.  I would like to propose, 
unless there is objection, that we sidestep this issue by assuming that 
wiki contributors implicitly own the copyright to anything that they 
generate.  Will this cause potential hardship down the road?

The licensing does need resolution.  I originally suggested GFDL, but 
Mathieu and John pointed out the objections to them.  Lloyd and Sam 
suggested Creative Commons, but Debian project seems also to consider 
that as a non-free documentation license.

The Debian project seems to have considered this issue at length, and if 
we follow their lead:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ddp-policy/ch-common.en.html
we can possibly use the same GPL-based license that we use for the 
software 
(http://nsnam.isi.edu/nsnam/index.php/Developer_Information#Licensing) 
for wiki text.  Although I had previously proposed the FreeBSD 
documentation license as an alternative, I would be fine with GPL as 
well, for consistency.

Any further thoughts on selecting the license for the wiki?  If there 
are no objections or further discussion, I'd like to suggest that we 
post on the wiki that content contributed to the wiki be licensed, by 
default, under the same GPL license we are using for the source code 
(perhaps replacing the word "program" with "wiki text" in the language). 
  If the contributor does not want to or cannot use GPL (example, he or 
she has written up some documentation for other use with other 
licensing, or is linking to someone else's documentation) the wiki 
should provide a hyperlink to that other material and not include it 
directly.

Tom

p.s. I assume that we can migrate parts of the existing documentation 
and web pages to such a license (perhaps John H. can confirm).