Licensing

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

Problematic. Expensive. Inhibits creativity and entrepreneurship.

Licensing in Software

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.

Licensing of Wiki content

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?

Ref:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Self
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Self/doc
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_MediaWiki_Core_Team/Backlog#Structured_license_metadata (off the priority list for Core team)
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100335 A bunch of issues being tracked related to this
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/License_integration_MediaWiki last editted in 2014
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Files_and_licenses_concept Concept elaboration

Compare:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Licenses
• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Licenses
• https://freephile.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Licenses