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
Michael Snow (wikipedia@earthlink.net) [050522 10:19]:
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.
In practical terms, I think it verges on the negligibly likely. Mozilla only relicensed because a lack of GPL compatibility was hurting their interactions with others and embeddability; I can't see Wikipedia wanting to relicense without an imminent pressing need to.
- d.
Michael Snow wrote:
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.
Furthermore, hardly any contributor will have left an e-mail address or any other contact information.
Michael Snow wrote:
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
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Please read the original post and you will see that noone asked to re-license the WIKIPEDIA content.
Maybe *you* didn't, and maybe the original post didn't, but that doesn't stop us from bringing it up anyway. We all know that the GFDL poses problems for people wishing to re-use Wikipedia content legally (e.g. teachers in schools). This is not a Wiktionary-only mailing list. Licensing issues are on-topic here.
2005/5/22, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net:
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.
<snip />
--Michael Snow
from [[Netscape]] "The Mozilla engineers decided to scrap the Communicator code and start over from scratch"
paz y amor, -rjs
Robin Shannon wrote:
2005/5/22, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net:
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.
from [[Netscape]] "The Mozilla engineers decided to scrap the Communicator code and start over from scratch"
To clear up any misunderstandings here: until very recently the majority of work on Mozilla was done by programmers employed by Netscape/AOL to work on it, and that code was thus owned by Netscape/AOL whether or not it dated back to the old Navigator or Communicator products.
From the beginning, any contributions from third parties had to grant a special license (Netscape Public Licence / Mozilla Public Licene) which gave Netscape the right to include it in their proprietary Netscape-branded browser product as well as the open-source Mozilla releases.
When the Mozilla project (then still headquartered at Netscape/AOL) a couple years later decided to add a GPL dual-license, Netscape/AOL was able to unilaterally change the license on code it outright owned. It was not able to do so on third-party submitted code for which only an NPL/MPL license was granted to them. For those third-party contributions, it was necessary to track down the authors and ask permission to change the license grant.
We're similar to the Mozilla case in that we do not require third-party contributors to assign copyright to us, so a licence change not specified for in the licenses already granted to us would require seeking permission from the contributor.
We're *different* from the Mozilla case in two important ways: 1) There is very little material that is owned outright by the Wikimedia Foundation, so virtually everything would require seeking permission.
2) We accept contributions with very little information on how to contact the author. We only rarely have e-mail addresses, and often all we have is a pseudonym or the network address and time at which the edit was submitted. This makes it very hard for us to track down prior contributors to ask permission.
</IANAL>
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On 5/22/05, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
- We accept contributions with very little information on how to
contact the author. We only rarely have e-mail addresses, and often all we have is a pseudonym or the network address and time at which the edit was submitted. This makes it very hard for us to track down prior contributors to ask permission.
Agreed. And here a derivative problem would rise: how we treat submissions from anonyomous (or unregistered users precisely). Curently more than half JA WP & EN WQ contributors are anons. On other projects, about 16-20%. I would make it sure we can safely ignore those anonymous submissions' right as "licence holder" [or somehow possible, because they can't or hardly be contacted, but I am not sure]...
Hallo, und thank you for your reply On 5/22/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Aphaia wrote:
I would make it sure we can safely ignore those anonymous submissions' right as "licence holder" [or somehow possible, because they can't or hardly be contacted, but I am not sure]...
Just because we can't contact them, doesn't mean they lose their copyright.,
Okay, so they hold their copyright until 50 years will pass from their submissions ... So rigidly it is impossible for us to switch licence -- or we should cast once all of anonymous submissions (because there is no established contact between them and us, and we are not sure talk page is enough for this purpose ...)
Aphaia wrote:
Hallo, und thank you for your reply On 5/22/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Aphaia wrote:
I would make it sure we can safely ignore those anonymous submissions' right as "licence holder" [or somehow possible, because they can't or hardly be contacted, but I am not sure]...
Just because we can't contact them, doesn't mean they lose their copyright.,
Okay, so they hold their copyright until 50 years will pass from their submissions ...
70 years in many countries.
Ec
As for re-licensing Wikipedia, personally, if it was up to me, I would be "bold" and do it the following way. I know that this is legally less secure than what Mozilla did, but I think that given our situation, it is reasonable. Someone in this thread mentioned that there is a judge who gives legal advice to Wikimedia -- maybe if he/she could post to give their opinion on whether this is legally feasible.
My idea is thus:
* Announce publicly the intended change of license from GFDL to WPL (Wikimedia Public License), and invite contributors to complain if they are unhappy with their material being re-licensed. Delete and re-write the material that is complained about.
* At some point (call it <date>), have all new articles licensed under WPL only.
* For one year starting on <date>, display a clear message on every page created before <date> stating that "This material is GFDL. We are intending to re-license it as WPL on <date+1year>. If you are the copyright holder and do not wish for your contributions to be re-licensed, please contact us."
* I imagine very few people will contact us, and we can state that people's silence is interpreted to mean they're OK with the re-licensing.
* Announce all of this extremely loudly in public. Post to all sorts of message boards, have news sites report it, etc. We have enough publicity to claim that we have contacted all contributors via public means. At that point, I believe it is no longer our responsibility if someone didn't notice anything for a whole year.
* One year after <date>, switch everything to WPL-only (or whatever you like). People may still complain after this, in which case we can still remove and re-write their work, but it is not really our responsibility that other people may have already re-used the work under WPL terms.
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
As for re-licensing Wikipedia, personally, if it was up to me, I would be "bold" and do it the following way. I know that this is legally less secure than what Mozilla did, but I think that given our situation, it is reasonable. Someone in this thread mentioned that there is a judge who gives legal advice to Wikimedia -- maybe if he/she could post to give their opinion on whether this is legally feasible.
My idea is thus:
Announce publicly the intended change of license from GFDL to WPL (Wikimedia Public License), and invite contributors to complain if they are unhappy with their material being re-licensed. Delete and re-write the material that is complained about.
At some point (call it <date>), have all new articles licensed under WPL only.
For one year starting on <date>, display a clear message on every page created before <date> stating that "This material is GFDL. We are intending to re-license it as WPL on <date+1year>. If you are the copyright holder and do not wish for your contributions to be re-licensed, please contact us."
I imagine very few people will contact us, and we can state that people's silence is interpreted to mean they're OK with the re-licensing.
Announce all of this extremely loudly in public. Post to all sorts of message boards, have news sites report it, etc. We have enough publicity to claim that we have contacted all contributors via public means. At that point, I believe it is no longer our responsibility if someone didn't notice anything for a whole year.
One year after <date>, switch everything to WPL-only (or whatever you like). People may still complain after this, in which case we can still remove and re-write their work, but it is not really our responsibility that other people may have already re-used the work under WPL terms.
Without committing myself to opposing or supporting this initiative, I would say that three years would be a more appropriate period. This would correspond to the normal statutory limitation under US copyright law.
Ec
On another hand, we are all talking like if re-licensing should be done right now in the blink of an eye... when we have time and we can do it slowly.
If we need something like a roadmap :
1. A good first step could be to enable dual-licensing as the default policy for new additions,
2. then to begin to authors of old-gfdl content to re-license their stuff,
3. and finally to replace gfdl-only content if necessary.
That would allow a slow but smooth process for relicensing. With adapted tagging, it could be a very good solution.
Jean-Baptiste Soufron
Le 22 mai 05 à 09:01, Brion Vibber a écrit :
Robin Shannon wrote:
2005/5/22, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net:
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.
from [[Netscape]] "The Mozilla engineers decided to scrap the Communicator code and start over from scratch"
To clear up any misunderstandings here: until very recently the majority of work on Mozilla was done by programmers employed by Netscape/AOL to work on it, and that code was thus owned by Netscape/AOL whether or not it dated back to the old Navigator or Communicator products.
From the beginning, any contributions from third parties had to grant a special license (Netscape Public Licence / Mozilla Public Licene) which gave Netscape the right to include it in their proprietary Netscape-branded browser product as well as the open-source Mozilla releases.
When the Mozilla project (then still headquartered at Netscape/AOL) a couple years later decided to add a GPL dual-license, Netscape/AOL was able to unilaterally change the license on code it outright owned. It was not able to do so on third-party submitted code for which only an NPL/MPL license was granted to them. For those third-party contributions, it was necessary to track down the authors and ask permission to change the license grant.
We're similar to the Mozilla case in that we do not require third- party contributors to assign copyright to us, so a licence change not specified for in the licenses already granted to us would require seeking permission from the contributor.
We're *different* from the Mozilla case in two important ways:
- There is very little material that is owned outright by the
Wikimedia Foundation, so virtually everything would require seeking permission.
- We accept contributions with very little information on how to
contact the author. We only rarely have e-mail addresses, and often all we have is a pseudonym or the network address and time at which the edit was submitted. This makes it very hard for us to track down prior contributors to ask permission.
</IANAL>
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com) _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
On another hand, we are all talking like if re-licensing should be done right now in the blink of an eye... when we have time and we can do it slowly.
If we need something like a roadmap :
- A good first step could be to enable dual-licensing as the default
policy for new additions,
then to begin to authors of old-gfdl content to re-license their stuff,
and finally to replace gfdl-only content if necessary.
That would allow a slow but smooth process for relicensing. With adapted tagging, it could be a very good solution.
One of the biggest obstacles to relicensing may be that I don't support it and that I don't think it is necessary or a good idea.
My opinion could change over time, of course, depending on circumstances. But I see no reason for it now.
--Jimbo
Thank you, that was quite interesting to read through - if there are other similar cases, I'd love to hear about them.
There are some but Mozilla is one of the biggest one. Actually, I just studied FLOSS licenses evolution and I really think it is a feasible thing.
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.
The good solution is a well done tagging job... And time.
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.
I think it would, but is it a priority today ?
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.
Then we should prepare something around it.
Jean-Baptiste Soufron (jbsoufron@gmail.com) [050523 02:42]:
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.
Then we should prepare something around it.
Easy in 1.5 - see [[m:Article validation feature]] and its associated [[m:category:Article validation]] for info and discussions. Add a field to the article ratings in Wiktionary.
- d.
On 22/05/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Easy in 1.5 - see [[m:Article validation feature]] and its associated [[m:category:Article validation]] for info and discussions. Add a field to the article ratings in Wiktionary.
I don't think this is as good a fit as some people are suggesting, since it's based entirely around *opinion* - everything to do with the quality, appropriateness, etc of an article is quite rightly regarded as a subjective decision, to be taken collectively by the community.
Whether or not a particular version of an article is distributable under a particular license (e.g. whether a given definition on a Wiktionary can be imported into a GFDL-incompatible database), on the other hand, is a completely *objective* question - the article either does, or does not, contain material contributed to by people who have not granted permission under licenses other than the GFDL.
----
Of course, this actually makes it far *easier* to do the tagging - the database "knows" who has contributed to an article (or revision), so if it was "told" which users had agreed to new licensing terms, it could determine (and update) the licensing status of every revision in the database. No human would need to think about it, just ask the computer!
This leaves articles in one of three states: 1) The current revision is available under the new licensing terms (all contributors to date have agreed to adopt them). 2) The current revision incorporates material not available under the new licensing terms (contributed by users who have not agreed to adopt them). However, there is a revision before any such non-relicenses contributions were made; therefore, that revision is safe to distribute under the new terms. 3) The very first revision was contributed by a user who has not agreed to relicense; taking all subsequent revisions to be "derivative versions" of that original material, the entire article is unavailable under the new licensing scheme.
For importing to Ultimate Wiktionary, this is all you need to know - at any point in time, you can act according to the state of an "article": If 1: import the current revision If 2: import the newest revision which is available under the new terms If 3: ignore the article, and create it from scratch within the new database
----
For relicensing Wikipedia, things become somewhat more complicated. Given the age of the project, and the general volume of edits and editors, there are likely to be a far higher proportion of articles in states 2 and 3, and by the nature of the content there would be a greater need to minimise the amount of effort "thrown away".
One possibility is that the license-checking tool could be made aware of page reversions - so an article in state 2 could be reverted to a relicensable revision and then re-developed. Presumably, information added later by contributors who had agreed to the terms could legally be [probably manually] re-added, as long as the bits added by people who *hadn't* agreed *weren't* included, in any form.
A key question would then be how to define the difference between a derivative work and a completely new one. How much does the article need to have changed from an older revision to claim that the newer version is not subject to the copyright of an older author? This would be particularly important for articles that were created a long time ago, and might well end up stuck in state 3 because the original author had long since ceased to be contactable - could the work put into vastly expanding Wikipedia's oldest articles be legally salvaged if everyone except their originators agreed to new terms?
Rowan Collins wrote:
Of course, this actually makes it far *easier* to do the tagging - the database "knows" who has contributed to an article (or revision), so if it was "told" which users had agreed to new licensing terms, it could determine (and update) the licensing status of every revision in the database. No human would need to think about it, just ask the computer!
This unfortunately isn't true.
The person who submitted an edit is not always the author of everything that they added: material may be copied from another article written by someone else, or even taken from an entirely separate resource that was under GFDL or a compatible license terms, which might not be compatible with a new license.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
On 24/05/05, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
The person who submitted an edit is not always the author of everything that they added: material may be copied from another article written by someone else, or even taken from an entirely separate resource that was under GFDL or a compatible license terms, which might not be compatible with a new license.
Hmm, that is indeed a good and rather worrying point: content imported under the GFDL or similar and compatible licences probably *should* be creditted as such in some way which could easily be recognised - if not by computer, by a dedicated team of humans telling the computer. But material copied from other articles - merges, splits, not to mention translations - is generally treated very laxly, with hopefully a reference in the edit summary, but not always even that.
Put it together with the thorny question of "when is a rewrite a rewrite", and it makes you wish for a meaningful "blame"/"who added this line" tool - though I tend to agree with the opinion that this would be an order of magnitude harder for the free text of encyclopedia articles than it is for source code. Although, it has to be noted that those IBM researchers managed to get meaningful data in their "history flow" system...
My point being, that if relicensing of this sort *were* ever attempted on Wikipedia, it would be impossible to do it properly without some such tool to trace where every bit of the text came from, and to check (manually, since edit summaries aren't likely to be reliably machine-readable) that the crucial edits were not only made by new-license-agreeable editors, but came from sources which were themselves new-license-compatible.
Rowan Collins (rowan.collins@gmail.com) [050526 09:03]:
Hmm, that is indeed a good and rather worrying point: content imported under the GFDL or similar and compatible licences probably *should* be creditted as such in some way which could easily be recognised - if not by computer, by a dedicated team of humans telling the computer. But material copied from other articles - merges, splits, not to mention translations - is generally treated very laxly, with hopefully a reference in the edit summary, but not always even that. Put it together with the thorny question of "when is a rewrite a rewrite", and it makes you wish for a meaningful "blame"/"who added this line" tool - though I tend to agree with the opinion that this would be an order of magnitude harder for the free text of encyclopedia articles than it is for source code. Although, it has to be noted that those IBM researchers managed to get meaningful data in their "history flow" system...
As I noted, Linus Torvalds' git treats the unit it cares about as the line, not the file. So blame is carried between filenames. Someone may find this worth experimenting with for the back end.
- d.
On 26/05/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Rowan Collins (rowan.collins@gmail.com) [050526 09:03]:
Put it together with the thorny question of "when is a rewrite a rewrite", and it makes you wish for a meaningful "blame"/"who added this line" tool - though I tend to agree with the opinion that this would be an order of magnitude harder for the free text of encyclopedia articles than it is for source code. Although, it has to be noted that those IBM researchers managed to get meaningful data in their "history flow" system...
As I noted, Linus Torvalds' git treats the unit it cares about as the line, not the file. So blame is carried between filenames. Someone may find this worth experimenting with for the back end.
Yes, but in free natural language text like a Wikipedia article, there isn't a meaningful definition of a "line" like with source code - you've got to either look at a paragraph (probably too big), or maybe a sentence (which requires somewhat more complex parsing - how many sentences are there in "e.g. What's the magic no.? 1.23!"). Plus, the database needed to carry that granularity of blame between articles in the whole of Wikipedia would surely be humongous - presumably involving some index of every line of every revision of every article in the entire encyclopedia, ready for comparison.
But like I say, I don't know how the IBM folks did it, nor even how "normal" source-analysis tools work, so maybe it is possible after all.
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