Re: Wiki Usage

[John Belmonte <john@...>]

Glenn Maynard wrote:
> 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.

For anyone so concerned about reuse (and perhaps attribution) of their
work, especially for significant pieces of code, the wiki is not the
place to house the authoritative copy.  Publish your work and license
statement from a location which (ideally) only you have write access to.

Another outlet for this issue is to ask the LuaForge maintainers to
enable the code snippets feature of their GForge software.  Snippets in
the system have a license declaration and identified contributor (at
least by email account).

> (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?)

I'm opposed to assertions of copyright on the wiki, since on a medium
that is world-writable and doesn't identify users, there is no
accountability for the person making the claim nor control of subsequent
(perhaps malicious) modifications to the claim or the work.

--John