Delirium wrote:
Does
anyone know of collaborative projects that have actually
switched licenses entirely, even in the software world?
Mozilla did, and it was a huge project with thousands of
contributors. They basically started emailing people asking for
permission to do the change, raised some publicity so hopefully some
people they couldn't find email addresses for would become aware of
the change, and then started replacing/rewriting code from people who
they couldn't contact or who didn't give permission.
For more, see their relicensing FAQ:
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html
Thank you, that was quite interesting to read through - if there are
other similar cases, I'd love to hear about them.
One significant obstacle, of course, is that we have a lot of
anonymous editors where it's effectively impossible to trace the
person who holds the copyright (as opposed to the computer from which
they made the contribution). I'm guessing that Mozilla didn't have
this problem. We probably also have a much larger volume of people who
are not contactable via email, since we don't require an email address
in order to sign up for an account.
Mozilla has been at this since 2001, apparently, and it looks like
they still have some non-relicensed code. They also inherited the
right to relicense all Netscape-owned code, which is presumably still
a considerable portion. The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to
relicense content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere
near that. And while I don't know how many people have actually
contributed code to Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different
level in terms of sheer numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that
the relicensing process would not scale very well, shall we say.
The possibility of rewriting content we're unable to relicense is
interesting to consider. It strikes me that one potential use for
Magnus Manske's article validation tool would be to flag revisions
when an article has been rewritten so as to remove the content that we
can't secure permission to relicense. But anyway, if people are
serious about actually relicensing, the longer they wait, the harder
it will be.
--Michael Snow
Hoi,
If you read the subjectline you will see it is not as impossible as it
seems. The number of contributors of Wiktionary is of a completely
different order of magnitude. Less people. And the problems that there
are when converting to the Ultimate Wiktionary are different as well.
Please read the original post and you will see that noone asked to
re-license the WIKIPEDIA content.
Thanks,
GerardM