copyright status of text and code snippets on lua-users.org

[Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra@...>]

Hi,

I'm new to the Lua language and community, and while trying to build
my first things in Lua I found lua-users.org to have much remarkably
usefull material. When I decided one of the code snippets there was
exactly what I was looking for, I wanted to use that snippet. Being a
good boy, I looked for a copyright notice, and what licence it was
released under, and found none. So I might be looking in the wrong
place, and there might actually be a copyright notice somewhere that I
didn't find. If there is, would someone be so good as to point it out
to me?

If there isn't that means that all the text and code snippets (and
text) on the wiki do not have a licence attached, and can't be used
for anything, without the orginal authors releasing it under some
licence that permits re-use under some condition or another. Even
worse, since it's a wiki and many pages have been changed a few times,
all full pages are derative works of the original author, which means
that to release it under some licence, all previous authors must be
contacted, and asked if their content can go under that licence. With
old, possibly gone users, and IP edits, who you will be unable to
track down, let alone give permission, you can easily see how deep the
copyright quagmire quickly becomes.

In the minicharter I read

" content guidelines

Any software running on the site such as CGI scripts should be under
BSD or GPL or similar free license. Any data related to the site
content (for example, wiki database) should be backed up and made
publicly available at regular intervals. One reason for this is if the
individuals controlling the lua-users.org site should go astray (from
the community's point of view), it will be possible to install the
content at another location and the Lua authors can redirect the
domain appropriately. "

The content beeing freely available is clearly the intention, but
without licence information, this is impossible (I note that the line
"Any data related to the site content (for example, wiki database)
should be backed up and made publicly available at regular intervals."
is already problematic, since when editing the wiki, you don't provide
permission to do that, and it is not instantly clear this will happen)

I really hope I'm overlooking something,

Kind regards,

Martijn Hoekstra