Re: Wiki Usage

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@...>]

On Sun, Oct 15, 2006 at 09:29:34AM -0400, John Belmonte wrote:
> 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.

GNU requires copyright assignment to have unambiguous authority to sue
people who violate the license on their software.  They're are among a
very small few who require this.

There's a benefit to having people sign a contract stating that they
have authority to license the software, but very few projects go that
far, and those that have a license from contributors are in much better
shape than those that don't.  (If you have a license, then you have
fraud to worry about.  If you don't have a license, then in addition to
worrying about fraud--that doesn't go away--you don't even have
permission to use it from the majority of people who are contributing
legitimately.)

> 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?

This question doesn't go away by not requiring a license; it just makes
it more likely that the code will have no chance at all of being usable.
Registration doesn't prevent copyright fraud, and the same misappropriation
can be done as a "contribution" patch in an email to the mailing list of
any of hundreds of projects.  I just don't see how the fraud you're
worried about is helped by not requiring licenses.

I do think there's a real problem in having a wiki that doesn't deal
with licensing at all: it encourages people to write useful code and
release it without licensing it.  (Most people, I think, don't care,
and just follow the rules of wherever they're posting.)  People think
they're contributing code that anyone can use, but they're not.
There's got to be a way to improve on that.

(By the way, from various things you've said, it almost sounds as if the
wiki has the opposite--a policy forbidding licensing code on it.  Just
to be clear, that's not the case, right?)

FWIW, the biggest (or at least most dense) set of code that could really
use licensing, and probably the easiest, is the LuaPowerPatches files ...

-- 
Glenn Maynard