Re: Wiki Usage

[John Belmonte <john@...>]

Glenn Maynard wrote:
> 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".
...
> 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.

Dealing with cooperative works is tricky business, and serious handling
of these matters requires people to sign contracts.  Witness the
complexity of contributing to GNU projects [1].  If not contracts, you
at least need sufficient money set aside for making problems go away.

Contracts or not, it's necessary to track the source of every edit to
the wiki (i.e. requires registration, authentication, history archive)--
that is what I'm against.  Without this, when fraud comes up, and some
agreement between two parties is broken (e.g. I told my publisher the
rights are cleared on this code from the wiki), resulting in a lawsuit
(e.g. author who's code was improperly put on the wiki sues my
publisher), where is the blame assigned?

--John


[1] http://www.gnustep.org/developers/conditions.text