Re: Wiki Usage

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@...>]

On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 08:53:29AM -0400, John Belmonte wrote:
> Have you considered: 1) people who have already contributed material in
> the past 5+ years may not see this after-the-fact agreement (e.g. they
> are not active in Lua any longer), 2) there is no registration required
> for write access to the wiki (by intention), so an anonymous person
> could post another party's content conflicting with the agreed upon
> license without being accountable.

Anyone can always "contribute" a third party's stuff without their
permission, claiming it's public domain.  That's possible in pretty
much any open source environment.  It's fraud, and an odd rationale
for saying "so let's not even try to get a license".

> Putting a license on the wiki now would give people wishing to reuse the
> content a false sense of security with no legal grounding.  We are not
> Wikipedia, and there are no funds to hire lawyers should someone be
> facing a lawsuit (likely me or Pepperfish).

Of course, you can't take the code that's already there and stick a
license on it; but you can move it into a grandfather zone, stick
"warning: no license on this!" at the top, and get licenses for future
contributions.

> I really don't regret having no license and no sign-in mechanism on the
> wiki from the start.  I view the wiki as graffiti on a public wall.  If
> someone wants to sell photographs of the wall they can at their own
> risk.  I like the freedom of public walls and free paint, and should the
> community insist this change I may regretfully wash my hands of
> lua-users.org.

"If someone wants to actually *use* the code on the wiki, they can at
their own risk"?  Not wanting to be sued, that translates to "don't
use the code on the wiki".  Graffiti is probably not intended to be
useful; I hope code on the wiki is.

The MIT (X11, Lua) license is excellent at allowing software to be
reused and adapted.  Code with no license can't be copied or reused
at all.  It's extra frustrating that probably all of the contributors,
if I was able to reach them, would probably put the code under Lua's
license without a second thought, and would have done so to begin
with if they'd been asked to.

-- 
Glenn Maynard