Consider adding license information to freedesktop.org wiki contents?

[Boyuan Yang]

Dear xdg list members,

I think it might be a great idea if we could explicitly add license
information for freedesktop.org wiki contents.

I raised this question on #***@freenode before and heard from
<daniels> that current license is "undefined".

To be more concrete, I would like to know the license and author for
page [1]. Some downstream projects are including the XML file into
their projects yet the uncertain license of code snippet caused some
copyright troubles. Looking through git history is not helpful since
the original page was converted from moinmoin wiki and the original
author information is lost.

Daniels also suggested that any new content on wiki can (and should)
have licensing information added. I think that the wiki should also
choose a fallback license. When the author didn't point out the
copyright information for page contents explicitly, the default
license should apply. That could eliminate any licensing problem in
the future.


Also sending mail copy to those involved in the discussion for
creating file-manager interface. Hope that the original author could
read the mail and explicitly state the license for page [1].


[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/file-manager-interface/

--
Regards,
Boyuan Yang

[Thomas Kluyver]

+1 to having a default license for the wiki contents.

Code samples in a wiki are often meant to be copied and pasted, so it seems appropriate to license them permissively, like an MIT license, or even public domain. I don't feel strongly about the non-code content, but CC-BY would be an easy default.

Thomas

Post by Boyuan Yang
Dear xdg list members,
I think it might be a great idea if we could explicitly add license
information for freedesktop.org wiki contents.
<daniels> that current license is "undefined".
To be more concrete, I would like to know the license and author for
page [1]. Some downstream projects are including the XML file into
their projects yet the uncertain license of code snippet caused some
copyright troubles. Looking through git history is not helpful since
the original page was converted from moinmoin wiki and the original
author information is lost.
Daniels also suggested that any new content on wiki can (and should)
have licensing information added. I think that the wiki should also
choose a fallback license. When the author didn't point out the
copyright information for page contents explicitly, the default
license should apply. That could eliminate any licensing problem in
the future.
Also sending mail copy to those involved in the discussion for
creating file-manager interface. Hope that the original author could
read the mail and explicitly state the license for page [1].
[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/file-manager-interface/
--
Regards,
Boyuan Yang
_______________________________________________
xdg mailing list
https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg

[Boyuan Yang]

Hello all,

Several weeks have passed and seems that there's no progress here; the mail
copy sent to original discussion participants got no replies and one of the
email address also bounces.

It would be great if anyone could help me get into contact with the original
author of https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/file-manager-interface
. Besides, I believe setting up a default license for freedesktop.org contents
should be of higher priority given freedesktop.org's fame and importance in
FLOSS world.

--
Regards,
Boyuan Yang

圚 2018幎3月22日星期四 CST 䞋午7:53:22Thomas Kluyver 写道

Post by Thomas Kluyver
+1 to having a default license for the wiki contents.
Code samples in a wiki are often meant to be copied and pasted, so it seems
appropriate to license them permissively, like an MIT license, or even
public domain. I don't feel strongly about the non-code content, but CC-BY
would be an easy default.
Thomas

Post by Boyuan Yang
Dear xdg list members,
I think it might be a great idea if we could explicitly add license
information for freedesktop.org wiki contents.
<daniels> that current license is "undefined".
To be more concrete, I would like to know the license and author for
page [1]. Some downstream projects are including the XML file into
their projects yet the uncertain license of code snippet caused some
copyright troubles. Looking through git history is not helpful since
the original page was converted from moinmoin wiki and the original
author information is lost.
Daniels also suggested that any new content on wiki can (and should)
have licensing information added. I think that the wiki should also
choose a fallback license. When the author didn't point out the
copyright information for page contents explicitly, the default
license should apply. That could eliminate any licensing problem in
the future.
Also sending mail copy to those involved in the discussion for
creating file-manager interface. Hope that the original author could
read the mail and explicitly state the license for page [1].
[1]
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/file-manager-interface/
--
Regards,
Boyuan Yang

[Thomas Kluyver]

Post by Boyuan Yang
Several weeks have passed and seems that there's no progress here; the mail
copy sent to original discussion participants got no replies and one of the
email address also bounces.

I get the impression that no-one really feels ownership or responsibility for XDG. When GNOME or KDE developers chime in, they tend to drive the discussion, but I don't know who, if anyone, focuses on improving the Freedesktop wiki and specifications.

I think this is a pity, and I hope someone can tell me that I'm wrong. :-)

Post by Boyuan Yang
It would be great if anyone could help me get into contact with the original
author of
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/file-manager-interface

Looking through the mailing list thread linked from that spec, it looks like Federico Mena Quintero was one of the main people involved in writing it. His GitHub profile lists an email address: https://github.com/federicomenaquintero .

Thomas

[Daniel Stone]

Hi Boyuan,

Post by Boyuan Yang
Several weeks have passed and seems that there's no progress here; the mail
copy sent to original discussion participants got no replies and one of the
email address also bounces.

Sorry for the lack of reply, I've been quite busy lately. I also don't
have a great answer for you. We cannot post-hoc enforce a licence on
content: anything that is there is copyright to the actual author. We
can enforce a licence on new content, but relicensing the existing
content is quite a time-consuming process: first finding who wrote it
in the first place, and then getting in contact with them. The former
is difficult because we have moved from twiki -> MoinMoin -> ikiwiki,
in most cases losing history. We can find the history, but it takes a
lot of time. Secondly, this content dates back in some cases to 2004,
and contacting people after 14 years is notoriously difficult.

This is not to say that it can't be done, it's just that we don't have
the time for it right now. Volunteers welcome. :)

Post by Boyuan Yang
It would be great if anyone could help me get into contact with the original
author of https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/file-manager-interface
. Besides, I believe setting up a default license for freedesktop.org contents
should be of higher priority given freedesktop.org's fame and importance in
FLOSS world.

I've CCed the two people who I believe wrote the content originally,
who can answer for the spec. They could assign a licence to it and
perhaps move it to the specifications repo as well.

Cheers,
Daniel

[Bastien Nocera]

On Fri, 2018-04-13 at 11:11 +0200, Daniel Stone wrote:
<snip>

Post by Daniel Stone

Post by Boyuan Yang
It would be great if anyone could help me get into contact with the original
author of https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/file-mana
ger-interface
. Besides, I believe setting up a default license for
freedesktop.org contents
should be of higher priority given freedesktop.org's fame and importance in
FLOSS world.

I've CCed the two people who I believe wrote the content originally,
who can answer for the spec. They could assign a licence to it and
perhaps move it to the specifications repo as well.

I've never touched this, sorry.

[Thomas Kluyver]

Post by Daniel Stone
Sorry for the lack of reply, I've been quite busy lately. I also don't
have a great answer for you. We cannot post-hoc enforce a licence on
content: anything that is there is copyright to the actual author. We
can enforce a licence on new content, but relicensing the existing
content is quite a time-consuming process: first finding who wrote it
in the first place, and then getting in contact with them. The former
is difficult because we have moved from twiki -> MoinMoin -> ikiwiki,
in most cases losing history. We can find the history, but it takes a
lot of time. Secondly, this content dates back in some cases to 2004,
and contacting people after 14 years is notoriously difficult.

I have seen other projects tackle relicensing by *attempting* to contact all contributors and explicitly giving some timeout - "if we don't receive any objections in a month, we'll go ahead". This seems like a sensible compromise - most people don't care about the licensing of two sentences they wrote on a wiki five years ago.

Of course, finding the list of contributors and valid email addresses for each one would still be quite a lot of work, but that strategy makes it a manageable amount rather than a crazy amount.

Is the history from the previous wiki systems preserved somewhere?

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2018, at 11:48 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:>

This isn't how copyright works, sorry.

Thanks, I was aware of this. No, it doesn't strictly adhere to 'how copyright works', but realistically, people who contribute to a freely available wiki about open source software are not going to sue you for putting an open source license on it. It's not even clear what they'd sue for: you can't lose revenue on wiki content that is already accessible at zero cost.

As I said, this is something I have seen projects do. The Ubuntu wiki underwent relicensing in 2011, for instance, with the wording in an email:
"In the absence of a substantial number of objections, this change will be made to the Ubuntu wiki after approximately one month."

Thomas

[Thomas U. Grüttmüller]

Post by Thomas Kluyver
On Fri, Apr 13, 2018, at 11:48 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:>

This isn't how copyright works, sorry.

Thanks, I was aware of this. No, it doesn't strictly adhere to 'how copyright works', but realistically, people who contribute to a freely available wiki about open source software are not going to sue you for putting an open source license on it.

People might change their view on free software.

People might also die, and their rights will be inherited by their heirs.

Post by Thomas Kluyver
It's not even clear what they'd sue for: you can't lose revenue on wiki content that is already accessible at zero cost.

It does not matter. Copyright violation is a criminal offense, just like
trespassing or slander. It does not matter for it to be forbidden, if
the victim suffers financial damage or not.

Post by Thomas Kluyver
"In the absence of a substantial number of objections, this change will be made to the Ubuntu wiki after approximately one month."

This is dangerous for re-users of the work, because they rely on the
license, but the license is invalid. So, without knowing, the re-user
will do a copyright violation and might be sued.

Thomas

[Thomas Kluyver]

I also stole about 30 sheets of toilet paper from a hotel a few weeks ago. Please, someone explain property law to me!

More seriously, it's clear that my proposed solution is not going to fly, because we're taking copyright Very Seriously. Since we are taking copyright Very Seriously, there are two problems:

1. No-one can copy code samples from the wiki, or redistribute specifications or anything, because they don't have a license. This is what the thread was originally about, and it seems like a pretty major flaw for a body making interoperability specifications for open source software.
2. Whoever runs freedesktop.org is violating all the contributors' copyright by redistributing the content they created, because you're not asked to grant a license when you edit the wiki.

Is anybody interested in fixing this? Do we even have a record of who edited what before the wiki was migrated to its current form?

If you think we can live with the ambiguous copyright situation as it is, then you weren't really taking copyright law Very Seriously, you were just picking an argument with me for trying to suggest a solution.

Thomas

Post by Thomas U. Grüttmüller

Post by Thomas Kluyver
On Fri, Apr 13, 2018, at 11:48 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:>

This isn't how copyright works, sorry.

Thanks, I was aware of this. No, it doesn't strictly adhere to 'how copyright works', but realistically, people who contribute to a freely available wiki about open source software are not going to sue you for putting an open source license on it.

People might change their view on free software.
People might also die, and their rights will be inherited by their heirs.

Post by Thomas Kluyver
It's not even clear what they'd sue for: you can't lose revenue on wiki content that is already accessible at zero cost.

It does not matter. Copyright violation is a criminal offense, just like
trespassing or slander. It does not matter for it to be forbidden, if
the victim suffers financial damage or not.

Post by Thomas Kluyver
"In the absence of a substantial number of objections, this change will be made to the Ubuntu wiki after approximately one month."

This is dangerous for re-users of the work, because they rely on the
license, but the license is invalid. So, without knowing, the re-user
will do a copyright violation and might be sued.
Thomas
_______________________________________________
xdg mailing list
https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg

[Thomas Kluyver]

I have found where the Moinmoin data is located (/srv/www.freedesktop.org/moin/data on annarchy.freedesktop.org). Could someone add me (takluyver) to the www-data group so I can investigate it further? Or you could make all that data world-readable.

Post by Thomas Kluyver
I also stole about 30 sheets of toilet paper from a hotel a few weeks
ago. Please, someone explain property law to me!
More seriously, it's clear that my proposed solution is not going to
fly, because we're taking copyright Very Seriously. Since we are taking
1. No-one can copy code samples from the wiki, or redistribute
specifications or anything, because they don't have a license. This is
what the thread was originally about, and it seems like a pretty major
flaw for a body making interoperability specifications for open source
software.
2. Whoever runs freedesktop.org is violating all the contributors'
copyright by redistributing the content they created, because you're not
asked to grant a license when you edit the wiki.
Is anybody interested in fixing this? Do we even have a record of who
edited what before the wiki was migrated to its current form?
If you think we can live with the ambiguous copyright situation as it
is, then you weren't really taking copyright law Very Seriously, you
were just picking an argument with me for trying to suggest a solution.
Thomas

Post by Thomas U. Grüttmüller

Post by Thomas Kluyver
On Fri, Apr 13, 2018, at 11:48 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:>

This isn't how copyright works, sorry.

Thanks, I was aware of this. No, it doesn't strictly adhere to 'how copyright works', but realistically, people who contribute to a freely available wiki about open source software are not going to sue you for putting an open source license on it.

People might change their view on free software.
People might also die, and their rights will be inherited by their heirs.

Post by Thomas Kluyver
It's not even clear what they'd sue for: you can't lose revenue on wiki content that is already accessible at zero cost.

It does not matter. Copyright violation is a criminal offense, just like
trespassing or slander. It does not matter for it to be forbidden, if
the victim suffers financial damage or not.

Post by Thomas Kluyver
"In the absence of a substantial number of objections, this change will be made to the Ubuntu wiki after approximately one month."

This is dangerous for re-users of the work, because they rely on the
license, but the license is invalid. So, without knowing, the re-user
will do a copyright violation and might be sued.
Thomas
_______________________________________________
xdg mailing list
https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg

_______________________________________________
xdg mailing list
https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

Post by Thomas Kluyver
I have found where the Moinmoin data is located (/srv/www.freedesktop.org/moin/data on annarchy.freedesktop.org). Could someone add me (takluyver) to the www-data group so I can investigate it further? Or you could make all that data world-readable.

The wiki doesn't run on MoinMoin anymore. All the wiki content is
publicly accessible here:
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Post by Thomas Kluyver

Post by Thomas Kluyver
I also stole about 30 sheets of toilet paper from a hotel a few weeks
ago. Please, someone explain property law to me!
More seriously, it's clear that my proposed solution is not going to
fly, because we're taking copyright Very Seriously. Since we are taking

Yes, we are because we have to.

Post by Thomas Kluyver

Post by Thomas Kluyver
1. No-one can copy code samples from the wiki, or redistribute
specifications or anything, because they don't have a license. This is
what the thread was originally about, and it seems like a pretty major
flaw for a body making interoperability specifications for open source
software.

Most specifications are _not_ hosted on the wiki, but are hosted here:
https://specifications.freedesktop.org/

Some of those specifications have licenses, others do not. For those
without licenses, it would be good to fix that by getting the content
properly licensed by agreement of the contributors.

Post by Thomas Kluyver

Post by Thomas Kluyver
2. Whoever runs freedesktop.org is violating all the contributors'
copyright by redistributing the content they created, because you're not
asked to grant a license when you edit the wiki.
Is anybody interested in fixing this? Do we even have a record of who
edited what before the wiki was migrated to its current form?
If you think we can live with the ambiguous copyright situation as it
is, then you weren't really taking copyright law Very Seriously, you
were just picking an argument with me for trying to suggest a solution.

Personally, yes, I am very interested in seeing the situation fixed
and regularised. Roughly in order, the steps to fix that would be:
* agree with people who currently and regularly contribute, or who
have made substantial contributions in the past, what the new license
should be
* declare this new license as required for new pages
* contact the authors of old wiki pages and specifications, seeking
their approval to relicense content
* tracking content which has not been relicensed and deciding at
some later stage whether to rewrite it, jettison it, or maintain it
with the old 'implicit' disclaimer

I don't have any time to do this, but will happily support anyone who
is interested in doing it, so long as it doesn't involve having to put
up with pointlessly sarcastic sniping.

Cheers,
Daniel

[Thomas Kluyver]

Post by Daniel Stone
The wiki doesn't run on MoinMoin anymore. All the wiki content is

I'm trying to get the history - a lot of the wiki pages in the current system were converted from moin, so that old data is needed to try to work out who wrote them. Sorry for not explaining that clearly enough.

[Thomas Kluyver]

And I apologise for sniping. It doesn't excuse my words, but I'm frustrated because discussions about the wiki seem to get radio silence until I irritated people.

Post by Thomas Kluyver

Post by Daniel Stone
The wiki doesn't run on MoinMoin anymore. All the wiki content is

I'm trying to get the history - a lot of the wiki pages in the current
system were converted from moin, so that old data is needed to try to
work out who wrote them. Sorry for not explaining that clearly enough.
_______________________________________________
xdg mailing list
https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg

[Daniel Stone]

Post by Thomas Kluyver

Post by Daniel Stone
The wiki doesn't run on MoinMoin anymore. All the wiki content is

I'm trying to get the history - a lot of the wiki pages in the current system were converted from moin, so that old data is needed to try to work out who wrote them. Sorry for not explaining that clearly enough.

OK, done now.

I understand the frustration, but we're all volunteers with
(extremely) limited time.

[Thomas Kluyver]

Post by Daniel Stone
OK, done now.

Thanks! By digging into that, I confirmed that Federico is the sole author of the file manager interface spec that kicked off this discussion. A couple of people, myself included, have adjusted formatting since the transition to ikiwiki, but that's not a creative work. I've emailed Federico to ask about licensing, and I'll let you know when he responds.

I've also built a list of which users edited which page on the MoinMoin wiki, to make it easier to do this for other pages:
https://gitlab.com/takluyver/xdg-moinmoin-archaeology/blob/master/page_editors.json

This data would have been public when that version of the wiki was live, and the equivalent data is public for the current wiki, so I don't think there can be any privacy concerns. I haven't re-published the raw wiki data I generated it from, in case that has some sensitive info, but anyone with access to annarchy.freedesktop.org can get the raw data if they want to check. The repo contains two notebooks with the code I used to put that list together.

Thomas

[Simon Lees]

Post by Thomas Kluyver
I also stole about 30 sheets of toilet paper from a hotel a few weeks ago. Please, someone explain property law to me!
1. No-one can copy code samples from the wiki, or redistribute specifications or anything, because they don't have a license. This is what the thread was originally about, and it seems like a pretty major flaw for a body making interoperability specifications for open source software.
2. Whoever runs freedesktop.org is violating all the contributors' copyright by redistributing the content they created, because you're not asked to grant a license when you edit the wiki.

I am no legal expert and hence my wording may not be legally correct but
the idea behind it stands. I suspect your #2 here is a non issue. Anyone
who goes to the effort of editing a wiki knows and acknowledges that the
content they have produced will be displayed on the wiki in its current
form and are therefore giving permission for the content they have
created to be redistributed by the wiki in its current form. If you were
to take a private wiki and make its contents public then you have an
issue because it was not reasonable for authors to expect that the
content they created would become publicly available.

If this did not hold then the issue would extend beyond wiki's into
bugtrackers, forums etc

[Thomas Kluyver]

Post by Simon Lees
Anyone
who goes to the effort of editing a wiki knows and acknowledges that the
content they have produced will be displayed on the wiki in its current
form and are therefore giving permission for the content they have
created to be redistributed by the wiki in its current form.

I'm fine with this 'implicit license' approach, but it's precisely the sort of grey area that other people insisted cannot possibly be allowed.

It's frustrating that people have the time and energy to argue about copyright, but nobody seems to be interested in doing anything to improve the wiki.

Thomas

[Simon Lees]

Post by Thomas Kluyver

Post by Simon Lees
Anyone
who goes to the effort of editing a wiki knows and acknowledges that the
content they have produced will be displayed on the wiki in its current
form and are therefore giving permission for the content they have
created to be redistributed by the wiki in its current form.

I'm fine with this 'implicit license' approach, but it's precisely the sort of grey area that other people insisted cannot possibly be allowed.

I am only fine with the 'implicit license' approach for the one area I
mentioned (being distributed on the original wiki with the same access
that existed at the time of writing. Unless someone can point me to a
precedent that does otherwise.

Post by Thomas Kluyver
It's frustrating that people have the time and energy to argue about copyright, but nobody seems to be interested in doing anything to improve the wiki.

The only way that I think we can realistically make the wiki situation
better is by changing it now to say new changes are under the following
license, then in 10 years hope that enough of the content has been
changed that someone can delete all the remaining non licensed content
then get someone else to fill in any gaps. (Note the person deleting the
content really needs to be different from the people writing the new
content, technically the people writing the new content probably should
have never read the old content).

I personally don't think any other approach is going to work, yes it
sucks, which is why i'm not spending time on it. (but I won't stop you
if you want to). If we were to go with the suggestion I wrote above
there are many others who could make that change easier then myself who
has no access. Where as contributing to this mailing list thread has
taken not much more then 10 minutes of my Sunday afternoon.

Either way if something is going to change there needs to be more
discussion yet as no one has agreed on which license we would use, which
you need to decide before contacting previous contributors. For example
if I wrote anything on the wiki which I don't think I did I would be
more then happy for it to be relicensed under a BSD/MIT style license
but would be less happy to allow because I don't think its the right
license for the task.

[Thomas Kluyver]

Post by Simon Lees
The only way that I think we can realistically make the wiki situation
better is by changing it now to say new changes are under the following
license, then in 10 years hope that enough of the content has been
changed that someone can delete all the remaining non licensed content
then get someone else to fill in any gaps.

I'm hoping it might also be possible to work at the level of individual pages: find everyone who has contributed to a page and get their agreement to put a license on it. In combination with agreeing a license for new changes, of course.

Post by Simon Lees
If we were to go with the suggestion I wrote above
there are many others who could make that change easier then myself who
has no access.

Do you know who these people are? Part of what makes this tricky is that I don't even know who can do admin stuff on the wiki.

Post by Simon Lees
Either way if something is going to change there needs to be more
discussion yet as no one has agreed on which license we would use, which
you need to decide before contacting previous contributors.

OK, let's try to move that forwards. I propose that we use the MIT license for any code on the wiki, and CC-BY for text and any other non-code content. These are equivalent in spirit, but MIT is written for source code.

Thomas

[Simon Lees]

Post by Thomas Kluyver

Post by Simon Lees
The only way that I think we can realistically make the wiki situation
better is by changing it now to say new changes are under the following
license, then in 10 years hope that enough of the content has been
changed that someone can delete all the remaining non licensed content
then get someone else to fill in any gaps.

I'm hoping it might also be possible to work at the level of individual pages: find everyone who has contributed to a page and get their agreement to put a license on it. In combination with agreeing a license for new changes, of course.

That might work for the most part, then at least we'd just end up with a
list of pages / sections of pages that need to be rewritten.

Post by Thomas Kluyver

Post by Simon Lees
If we were to go with the suggestion I wrote above
there are many others who could make that change easier then myself who
has no access.

Do you know who these people are? Part of what makes this tricky is that I don't even know who can do admin stuff on the wiki.

Unfortunately not, I only started having an interest in this area over
the last couple of years.

Post by Thomas Kluyver

Post by Simon Lees
Either way if something is going to change there needs to be more
discussion yet as no one has agreed on which license we would use, which
you need to decide before contacting previous contributors.

OK, let's try to move that forwards. I propose that we use the MIT license for any code on the wiki, and CC-BY for text and any other non-code content. These are equivalent in spirit, but MIT is written for source code.

Id agree that's reasonable.

[r***@gmail.com]

Post by Simon Lees
if I wrote anything on the wiki which I don't think I did I would be
more then happy for it to be relicensed under a BSD/MIT style license
but would be less happy to allow because I don't think its the right
license for the task.

allow _______???

[Simon Lees]

Post by r***@gmail.com

Post by Simon Lees
if I wrote anything on the wiki which I don't think I did I would be
more then happy for it to be relicensed under a BSD/MIT style license
but would be less happy to allow because I don't think its the right
license for the task.

allow _______???

Sorry this is what happens when you get interrupted by kids, I was
probably going to put some form of gpl in that blank as an example, but
there are many different licenses I could list there instead.