Current Situation

Currently the license for the use of the wiki and its content is not explicitly stated. The page footer states that "Copyright is retained by the original authors of the page" however gives no details on what permissions are granted to viewers of the wiki and how the content may be redistributed or reused in other mediums. Obviously this is not an ideal scenario.

At the June Committee Meeting the WlugCommittee resolved to pursue a plan to progressively bring the wiki under a CreativeCommons Wiki License. It is recognised that this will be an ongoing process and will involve gaining permission from a wide range of authors and contributors to the wiki. The chosen license and the procedure that will be followed to implement it is described below.

Wiki License

Please not that as described in the paragraph above, this license statement does not yet apply to the wiki and will not come into effect until Mon 18 July 2005 00:00 NZST

Except where otherwise noted, this wiki is licensed under the Creative Commons Wiki License

By editing or posting to this wiki, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under a Creative Commons Wiki 0.5 (beta) license or any later version, and you agree to waive attribution for your contributions with the understanding that copyrighted material made available from this wiki will be attributed to the wiki itself, namely the WlugWiki.

Please link back to this site (http://www.wlug.org.nz/) when giving attribution.

Technical License Details

The license for content in the WlugWiki is the CreativeCommons Wiki License with Attribution and Share Alike clauses. This means that content on the wiki is able to be copied / modified / improved, either on the site or independently of the site provided that where the content is used it is attributed to the WlugWiki and the resulting content is made available under the same license as the Wiki itself.

The WlugWiki also supports the NzlugWiki? as they are both run from the same backend and are exactly the same content, this means that the NzlugWiki? license is identical to the WlugWiki license except the attribution may be made to the NzlugWiki? rather than the WlugWiki if desired.

Further details about this license can be found at http://creativecommons.org/drafts/wiki_0.5

As described in the license application text above, there are some portions of the wiki that are not currently licensed under the CreativeCommons wiki license. These are as follows

1. Imported content (Man pages / LDP HOWTOs / etc)
2. Pages that contain content added before Mon 18 July 2005 00:00 NZST where we have not been able to secure permission from all authors that contributed to the current page version to relicense their content under the CreativeCommons Wiki License.

These pages are clearly marked at the bottom of the page as not being available under the CreativeCommons license.

Relicensing Procedure

The procedure for relicensing existing content to the CreativeCommons license will be as follows

1. All authors (the Username you logged in to make edits as) should create a HomePage and add code to it indicating their acceptance of the WlugWikiLicense. This denotes that you agree that all past content you have added / editing in the wiki and all future content you add / edit in the wiki may be licensed under the CreativeCommons Wiki License.

   • See ExampleHomePage for details of the code to add to your HomePage to agree to the license.
   • Additions of this sort to HomePage's will be closely monitored by the WikiGnome's to ensure (as much as is possible) that only the legitimate author can add this to their page.
2. A WikiPlugin will automatically extract this information from all HomePage's to construct a list of authors who have allowed their content to be placed under the CreativeCommons Wiki License.

3. A WikiPlugin will analyse the content of each page and the diffs in which that content was added to determine if all authors of the current version have agreed to the CreativeCommons Wiki License and will display the appropriate license information at the bottom of the page to indicate to viewers the license state of the page.

   • For this process only substantial additions / edits to a page will be considered when determining the licensing status. In the first instance the minor change flag of the diff will be examined, if it is true, the licensing status of that diff will be ignored. If it is not true then the size of the diff is examined, if it is less than ten lines then the licensing status of that diff will also be ignored.
   • The outcome of this process is that online diffs which were not marked as minor changes and added or editing more than 10 lines of content will be considered in determining the license status of a page.
4. The committee will actively seek to contact authors and get their acceptance of the new license to progressively bring more and more of the wiki under the new license.
5. Where an author cannnot be reached or does not agree to the terms of their new license their content will be removed from the wiki and an alternative author will be sought to provide similar replacement content.

Contact Point / Questions / Copyright Complaints

The migration process and general wiki copyright issues are currently being handled by MattBrown of the WlugCommittee. If you have any questions regarding the migration progress, or you believe there is problematic content in the wiki that needs to be dealt with please contact him.

His contact details are available at MattBrown or http://www.mattb.net.nz/ or you can use the wikilicense at wlug.org.nz role address to email him.

Licensing Todo List

The following tasks need to be completed to achieve the goals listed on this page

• Write author license plugin
• Write page status plugin
• Add appropriate license information to bottom of each page
• Add appropriate license metadata to each page and RSS feeds etc
• Add notice of wiki license to the edit page
• Write plugins for manpages / howto's etc so that their content is not actually included in the wiki itself.