Re: Wiki Usage

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@...>]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 08:44:18AM -0400, John Belmonte wrote:
> 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.

I'm concerned as a user, not an author.  (I don't need a licensing
policy on the wiki for my own code; if I upload code to a wiki, I'll
either include a license or--more likely--explicitly release it into
the public domain.)

You seem to downplay the value of code reuse, but it seems like the
fundamental purpose of many contributions.  The LuaPowerPatches page is
the biggest concentration.  A couple other examples (skimming my browser
history) are ObjectProperties and DebuggingAndTesting.

(By the way, is the "the resulting language cannot be called Lua" bit
on LuaPowerPatches a leftover from a previous Lua license that can be
removed?)

> 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).

If you don't think the wiki should be used for this purpose (and the
above can be enabled), then let's think about how the wiki can encourage
people to contribute their code there instead.

> > (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.

But you say that as if, by not asserting copyright, the code isn't
copyrighted.  That code is copyrighted anyway; providing a license
relaxes it, giving people permission to use it.  I'm not looking for
people to put extra restrictions on their contributions to the wiki;
I'd like people to put fewer, freeing up the code so it can be used.

-- 
Glenn Maynard