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Glenn Maynard wrote:
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.[snip] 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?)
Well put. Glenn's arguments is essentially what my line of thought was when I put forward my earlier suggestion. It wasn't my intention to increase the level of risk shouldered by the host of the wiki.
Setting up a proper mechanism to facilitate the use of material in the wiki gives a net positive benefit to Lua as a whole. I'm concerned that by not clarifying this issue, it will become a barrier to efforts in increasing the use of Lua.
Since John Belmonte is not keen on a license, perhaps we can add appropriate disclaimers plus explanation, and encourage authorship identification. If publisher A thinks that material PQR by author B is great, A can contact author B. If author B's reputation in the Lua community is rock-solid, then publisher A may decide to go ahead and use the material. Of course, if A or anybody else is petty or malicious, nothing is going to stop a lawsuit, license or no license.
An extreme risk-averse policy will not help the production of more web pages or documentation on Lua. We can be completely honest and do everything right and still be sued by someone using the legal system for strategic purposes. At some point, there has to be a certain amount of trust and a certain amount of risk. Even the supposedly safe path of trusting legal experts can fail, as HP found to their regret. Zero risk is impossible to achieve, except perhaps by engaging in hara-kiri.
-- Cheers, Kein-Hong Man (esq.) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia