Discussion: Level
Can we copy stuff from Wikipedia here? I thought anything from ther had to be used under the GFDL. ~BoggyB
I believe that you are right. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights for more information about Wikipedia’s license. Specifically this part:
The license Wikipedia uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). Wikipedia articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom.
We do not meet these criteria. Linking back to wikipedia would be an easy thing, but we would need to abide by the license, too. I am sympathetic towards the GFDL license and pretty much think that ERE should be pretty much open-source.
Tangent: I think that the same should have counted for other large parts of J2O (our in-site articles (not the articles section), at the least) but going back and clearing it by contacting all people who’ve worked on it would be too much work.
I am open to pursuing a GFDL license for ERE but do not have the time to find out all the nitty-gritty details on how to completely comply with it (for example, some people seem to say that Wikipedia does not fully comply with GFDL or at least not with its original intent, but I do not know the details of that and would need to find out to make sure we do not copy Wikipedia’s follies.) so for now I’ll not pursue such a license. I would want to do it right and I do not have the resources to do that, now. For that reason I’ll disallow entering of Wikipedia content into ERE in a non-Fair Use context. ~Fquist
On a related note, I have an affection for the Creative Commons license. There’s something awesome about licenses for which you do not have to read a book-length of material to understand them. I think it might be a suitable license for ERE (The Attribution-Noncommercial CC license? I’m not sure about the share-alike one. Copyleft is interesting but it does put some extra restrictions on the work. It’s rather odd to force someone to use the same license as you. I would have no problem with commercial use of ERE but ERE users might so a Noncommercial clause sounds proper. ~Fquist
The CC license rocks, I’m all for it. I suggest using the Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/nl/deed.en) one, which seems to be the one you suggested too. Fl@$h aka BlewMeUp
I’m not that keen on the GPL and related licenses myself (it works, but to me it seems less like a F/OSS license and more like a tool for a crusade against closed source). I do like Creative Commons – it’s simple, and it works. I’d go for either CC-by or CC-by-nc, depending on what people think. ~BoggyB