Wisdom Project wrote: [snip]

"All these projects are based on wiki technology: they are open knowledge bases which can be improved by anyone. This is the homepage of the underlying open source wiki engine, MediaWiki, which is developed here on SourceForge via CVS, and is available under the GNU General Public License (the contents of the Wikimedia wikis themselves are licensed under the GNU FDL). "

I was wondering if anyone can clarify the last line of this page. Is it saying that any content created on any installation of the Wikimedia software is automatically licensed under the GNU FDL?

There is no such thing as 'Wikimedia software'.

MediaWiki is the software which runs the wikis. It imposes no restrictions whatsoever on the licensing of stuff you write in your wiki (but may be configured to display a notice about the licensing you have decided to put on your content).

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is the non-profit corporation which operates Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikiquote. These projects have all been established with content licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, and if you submit materials *to those projects* you must license your material in accordance with that.

Specifically, if I wanted to install and use Wikimedia software privately to write a book or whatever, is that content immediately licensed by the GNU FDL or am I free to copyright content on a private installation however I wish?

You are free to copyright content on a private installation however you wish.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)