Previous License Situation

Up until Mon 18 July 2005 the license for the use of the wiki and its content was not explicitly stated. The page footer stated that "Copyright is retained by the original authors of the page" however no details were given on what permissions were granted to viewers of the wiki and how the content may be redistributed or reused in other mediums. Obviously this was not an ideal scenario.

At the June 2005 Committee Meeting the WlugCommittee resolved to pursue a plan to progressively bring the wiki under a CreativeCommons Wiki License. This is an ongoing process and will involve gaining permission from a wide range of authors and contributors to the wiki. At the point of transition to the new license around 80-90% of the wiki content was able to be licensed 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 HomePages will be closely monitored by the WikiGnomes 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 HomePages 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 only 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.

Licensing Todo List

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

• Add appropriate license metadata to each page and RSS feeds etc
• Write plugins for manpages / howtos etc so that their content is not actually included in the wiki itself.