Changes

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.

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 that 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.

The simplest workaround solution I could come up with on short notice found was to export (using [[mw:Special:Export]]) the category 'License_templates[[mw:Category:License templates]]' from mediawiki.org . The category includes 30+ templates and import them heremodules.<pre>Template:BSD 1 revisionTemplate:PD Help Page 1 revisionTemplate:MIT 1 revisionTemplate:PD 1 revisionTemplate:LGPL 1 revisionTemplate:PD-self 1 revisionTemplate:Cc-by-sa-3Be sure to tick the box that says "Include templates".0 1 revisionTemplate:Free screenshot 1 revisionTemplate:Cc-by-3This will generate an xml file for download.0 1 revisionTemplate Then, import that file (using [[Special:Unknown copyright-notice 1 revisionTemplate:FAL 1 revisionTemplate:PD-textlogo 1 revisionTemplate:Cc-by-4.0 1 revisionTemplate:Cc-by-sa-4Import]]) on your wiki (as admin user).0 1 revisionTemplate:GFDL 1 revisionTemplateNote to self:Unknown copyright 1 revisionTemplatelook at the https:GPL 1 revisionTemplate:Cc-by-sa-2.5 1 revisionTemplate:BSD/doc 1 revisionTemplate:Documentation 1 revisionTemplate:Documentation subpage 1 revisionTemplate:File other 1 revisionTemplate:Image other 1 revisionTemplate:Mbox 1 revisionTemplate:Tl 1 revisionTemplate:Tlx 1 revisionModule:Arguments 1 revisionModule:Category handler 1 revisionModule:Category handler/blacklist 1 revisionModule:Category handlerwww.mediawiki.org/config 1 revisionModule:Category handlerwiki/data 1 revisionModuleExtension:Category handler/shared 1 revisionModule:Documentation 1 revisionModule:Documentation/config 1 revisionModule:Message box 1 revisionModule:Message box/configuration 1 revisionModule:Namespace detect/config 1 revisionModule:Namespace detect/data 1 revisionModule:No globals 1 revisionModule:Yesno 1 revisionTemplate:Dir 1 revisionTemplate:GetFallback 1 revisionTemplate:Int 1 revisionTemplate:LangSwitch 1 revisionTemplate:Langcat 1 revisionTemplate:Languages 1 revisionTemplate:Languages/Lang 1 revisionTemplate:Languages/Title 1 revisionTemplate:Nmbox 1 revisionTemplate:PD Help Page/core/en 1 revisionTemplate:Pagelang 1 revisionTemplate:Translation 1 revisionTemplate:Uselang 1 revisionModuleUploadWizard for ways to improve https:Template translation 1 revisionTemplate:Category 1 revisionTemplate:Help/Category 1 revisionTemplate:Help/If en 1 revisionTemplate:Imbox 1 revisionTemplate:PD/doc 1 revisionTemplate:Pp-meta 1 revisionTemplate:Pp-meta/pagetype 1 revisionTemplate:Pp-template 1 revisionTemplate:TNTN No revisions imported (all were either already present, or skipped due to errors)www.Template:Tlx2 1 revisionTemplate:Translatable template name 1 revisionTemplate:Free screenshot/doc 1 revisionTemplate:Cc-by-3mediawiki.0org/doc 1 revisionTemplate:File title 1 revisionTemplate:Unknown copyright-noticewiki/doc 1 revisionTemplateExtension:- 1 revision</pre>Html2Wiki in terms of incorporating license templates into the extension.