Licensing

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This article is about three aspects of Licensing:

  1. Licensing in general
  2. Licensing as it applies to software
  3. Licensing (attribution, etc.) of content/works as it is implemented in MediaWiki system.

Licensing in General[edit | edit source]

Problematic. Expensive. Inhibits creativity and entrepreneurship.

Licensing in Software[edit | edit source]

Although there are several advantages to using Free Software, one of the biggest and most obvious advantages is the fact that the licensing is 'free'. This means that you as an organization can spend a LOT less money and time ensuring licensing compliance. There are still compliance issues, but it shouldn't be too difficult. The GPL is the best software license. (There are of course nuances. For example, the GNU Affero license is the best for software providing a service across the network.) Use the GPL. If you choose some other license for your software, you risk making your software incompatible with GPL software; you take away rights for your users and ultimately threaten the longevity and usefulness of your software. In case you do not use the GPL, you will likely need to spend all kinds of money on legal fees and 'compliance' audits. See Licensing/software for more background and detail.

Licensing of Wiki content[edit | edit source]

The Wikipedia project underwent a licensing update in 2008/2009 from GFDL to dual-licensing scheme including the non-compatible CC-BY-SA.

In 2016, I'm noticing that there are some quirks in the software that I'm still investigating, so I've got notes here. Basically, I want to simply figure out whether there are any issues to implementors / site Administrators. When setting up a fresh install of MediaWiki; or upgrading a previous installation; is there anything to do with regard to the licensing templates or interface messages so that Special:Upload "just works"? One oddity that I found was that there were a bunch of "self-published" options available in the licensing dropdown, however they rely on a template named 'self' which was not present in this wiki. It is not a trivial exercise to export/import the template from mediawiki.org nor wikipedia.com. Because of the complex nature of these licensing templates, it is not possible to "copy" the template text.

Ref:

Compare:

Solution[edit | edit source]

The simplest workaround I could come up with on short notice was to export the category 'License_templates' from mediawiki.org and import them here. 

Template:BSD 1 revision
Template:PD Help Page 1 revision
Template:MIT 1 revision
Template:PD 1 revision
Template:LGPL 1 revision
Template:PD-self 1 revision
Template:Cc-by-sa-3.0 1 revision
Template:Free screenshot 1 revision
Template:Cc-by-3.0 1 revision
Template:Unknown copyright-notice 1 revision
Template:FAL 1 revision
Template:PD-textlogo 1 revision
Template:Cc-by-4.0 1 revision
Template:Cc-by-sa-4.0 1 revision
Template:GFDL 1 revision
Template:Unknown copyright 1 revision
Template:GPL 1 revision
Template:Cc-by-sa-2.5 1 revision
Template:BSD/doc 1 revision
Template:Documentation 1 revision
Template:Documentation subpage 1 revision
Template:File other 1 revision
Template:Image other 1 revision
Template:Mbox 1 revision
Template:Tl 1 revision
Template:Tlx 1 revision
Module:Arguments 1 revision
Module:Category handler 1 revision
Module:Category handler/blacklist 1 revision
Module:Category handler/config 1 revision
Module:Category handler/data 1 revision
Module:Category handler/shared 1 revision
Module:Documentation 1 revision
Module:Documentation/config 1 revision
Module:Message box 1 revision
Module:Message box/configuration 1 revision
Module:Namespace detect/config 1 revision
Module:Namespace detect/data 1 revision
Module:No globals 1 revision
Module:Yesno 1 revision
Template:Dir 1 revision
Template:GetFallback 1 revision
Template:Int 1 revision
Template:LangSwitch 1 revision
Template:Langcat 1 revision
Template:Languages 1 revision
Template:Languages/Lang 1 revision
Template:Languages/Title 1 revision
Template:Nmbox 1 revision
Template:PD Help Page/core/en 1 revision
Template:Pagelang 1 revision
Template:Translation 1 revision
Template:Uselang 1 revision
Module:Template translation 1 revision
Template:Category 1 revision
Template:Help/Category 1 revision
Template:Help/If en 1 revision
Template:Imbox 1 revision
Template:PD/doc 1 revision
Template:Pp-meta 1 revision
Template:Pp-meta/pagetype 1 revision
Template:Pp-template 1 revision
Template:TNTN No revisions imported (all were either already present, or skipped due to errors).
Template:Tlx2 1 revision
Template:Translatable template name 1 revision
Template:Free screenshot/doc 1 revision
Template:Cc-by-3.0/doc 1 revision
Template:File title 1 revision
Template:Unknown copyright-notice/doc 1 revision
Template:- 1 revision

Perhaps a better solution, with work to investigate how they do it, is to look at the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UploadWizard extension. At the very least, it's worth looking at for improvements to the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Html2Wiki extension.

General Public License = A sane copyright license

Gnu's Not Unix, because Unix is proprietary software while Gnu is software that respects your freedom.

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