Re: Wiki Usage

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@...>]

On Sat, Oct 21, 2006 at 11:11:31AM -0400, John Belmonte wrote:
> My wording was poor.  I meant "for any authors truly concerned about
> giving others the freedom to reuse their work".

I suspect that everyone posting code on the wiki would like it to be
usable, and that most of them doing so think it is.

> So what will happen if you post code on the wiki and mark it as "(C)
> Glenn Maynard" and licensed under the GPL.  A malicious user can 1)
> insert proprietary or patented code into yours, 2) change the code to
> delete the user's home directory, 3) replace your name with another's,
> 4) change the license.  The malicious user can do this in the middle of
> a flurry of valid edits by some eager wiki contributor, so that his
> change will go unnoticed.  After time the edit will fall off the page
> history.  If you use the file area of lua-users.org instead of putting
> your code inline on the wiki, there is even less chance of malicious
> changes being noticed.  People have even put binaries in the file area,
> which I think is a bit foolish.

People are always capable of fraud and license violations, on wikis
and elsewhere.  I don't understand this as a rationale for not asking
for a license at all.  If I supply a license (eg. the X11/MIT/Lua
license), then people can use the code; if I don't supply one at all,
then they can't.  (For that matter, people can do malicious things
even if I don't supply a license: they could, for example, falsely
attach the GPL to code meant to be permissive.)

It just seems like the logic is: someone might screw around, so it's
better to have no permission at all.  In any case, there are probably
ways of fixing this that don't require licenses on the wiki.

(Aside: why limit page histories?  I can't imagine that edits being
so active that it would be a storage issue.  Maybe wikis aren't as
space-efficient at it as eg. CVS/SVN.)

> Not at all, I'm pretty serious about promoting nonproprietary works of
> all kinds, including software.  I was one of the most vocal about Lua
> switching to a standard license.  However, the wiki is a very informal
> place by intention, and has its limitations when used as primary
> distribution for a work.  Despite this (and because of it), the wiki has
> been of high value to many Lua users.

But people are doing so, putting useful, nontrivial blocks of code on it,
usually with no indication of it being available anywhere else, or under
any license.  If you think that people shouldn't be using the wiki like that,
it seems like the wiki should discourage it.  Otherwise, people will continue
to write code and post it on the wiki, under the impression that that's
enough to allow people to use it.

I don't care where the code goes--I just want contributions intended to be
freely usable to actually be freely usable, and the wiki to not encourage
people to contribute code in a way that doesn't actually contribute code;
if not by asking for a license, then by pointing code contributions somewhere
that does.

-- 
Glenn Maynard