I just noticed that in 2.2RC1 "under a CC license" is now a link to the CC-BY license. I had a look over it and found: "If you distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform the Work or any Derivative Works or Collective Works, You must keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the Original Author credit reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name (or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied; the title of the Work if supplied; to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier" This appears to indicate (and appearance is everything) that people can't remove the "under a CC license" note when distributing applications based on XE. This could also be read as: "you must include the CC note on any XE based website you build". I understand the idea of switching to LGPL was to allow for the writing of proprietary XWiki applications but I think the CC-BY notice sends mixed messages. Suppose we were to removed the copyright note from the footer and added an MIT style license header to the top of the code of each application (in a comment at the beginning of the script macro). The MIT license contains the indemnification clause but allows sublicensing so people could build on XE and license the result as they wish. Also the MIT license is considered GPL compatible while the CC-BY license is not. My feeling is that XE is so dependent on the core that no matter how it's used, XWiki wins. Just a thought... Caleb The licenses for comparison: Expat ("MIT") http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt CC-BY http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode As a side note, CC gives me the creeps the way they hide their licenses behind "human readable common deeds". Guillaume Lerouge wrote:
Hi,
On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:23 AM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
On Feb 3, 2010, at 10:17 AM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote:
Hi,
here's my take on this topic:
- The code we write, be it in the core or in XE, should be licensed under the LGPL license (better suited for code than a CC license, what's the point of having the whole blog application licensed as CC when obviously it's not content?) Can you elaborate on "better suited for code" for the XAR pages?
With pleasure. If you please, I'll take the liberty of going for a reasoning ad absurdum:
1. All the code committers write for XWiki Core is licensed under the LGPL 2. We can reasonably agree that most of the content of the default XE XAR beyond Main.WebHome and the Sandbox space is made of code 3. Thus if a CC license is the best license for code in the XE XAR, why don't we also use it for XWiki Core?
- We should leave the choice of the content license to the wiki owner
(what's the point of imposing a default one to him / her) We don't impose anything. This is editable from the Admin page. What we provide is a default license for the *pages we provide*
This is absolutely not clear. The license is displayed in the footer of all pages. New pages bear it too. Since the current wording is very imprecise, a wiki admin cannot know whether she would be allowed to change the content license for all pages of the wiki at once. AFAIK the license can't be changed on a per page basis.
- The "default" case for copyright licenses is already defined by the law
of pretty much every country, thus the default we should choose should be not to display anything by default (which is also another reason why we'd want to make the code in the XE XAR licensed under the LGPL) I don't understand this part. Can you prove what you say?
Sure. Please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Obtaining_and_enforcing_copyright , specifically:
"In all countries where the Berne Convention<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works>standards apply, copyright is automatic, and need not be obtained through official registration with any government office. Once an idea has been reduced to tangible form, for example by securing it in a fixed medium (such as a drawing, sheet music, photograph, a videotape, or a computer file), the copyright holder is entitled to enforce his or her exclusive rights."
- Ideally we'd add a "license" field somewhere in the admin interface
that, when filled, would be displayed in the footer It's already there ;) (could be improved though)
I'm aware of this but the current interface isn't exactly of the most practical form ;-)
Guillaume
-Vincent
WDYT?
Guillaume
On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 1:55 AM, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> wrote:
On 02/03/2010 01:01 AM, Caleb James DeLisle wrote:
Gnu lists CC-BY and CC-BY-SA as GPL incompatible http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#OtherLicenses
In my opinion, licensing something under multiple licenses which are as incompatible is not the best decision, the obvious problem is it is not allowable to distribute the WAR with the XAR preinstalled.
There may be a problem with the viral nature of LGPL given that the core (templates) make reference to XE (download the default pages here) and XE obviously makes a lot of calls to core functions. Since each references the other it might be hard to claim that XE is using the core is as a library. I don't agree that this is a valid hard link which would cause the LGPL core to become viral to the wiki pages.
These are wiki pages. This is data. This data is sometimes executable. This data sometime results in platform methods being called. A shell script results in bash methods being called. Must all shell scripts be GPL because they end up executing bash code? This data gets converted from wiki source to HTML code through the core. A C program gets converted from C source to executable code through GCC. Must all C programs be GPL because they pass through GCC?
This is obviously library usage, since it's code that calls API methods through a proxy.
I think that we need to define what activity we want to allow and what we want to prevent.
Caleb
Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
On 02/02/2010 06:27 PM, Vincent Massol wrote: > On Feb 1, 2010, at 10:46 AM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote: > >> Hi devs, >> >> I just noticed that although we've been saying that "This wiki is >> licensed under a Creative Commons 2.0 license", all the source files for >> the wiki pages are actually under the LGPL, which contradicts the wiki. > Actually our pages are under no license right now (There's no license in the XML files and there should be one). Kind of, the license is in the pom. Although it does not appear in each file, doesn't the fact that it's a file belonging to a LGPL project almost make it LGPL too?
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