Licensing Wikinews - Wikinews-l

1 Aug 2005

The international language editions of Wikinews are still in beta, but
some of the other language version have already moved one step closer
to getting out of that state - they got a license. Now... This is not
a good thing.

The Spanish, Serbian and Romanian editions are all licensed under the
GNU FDL, and the Japanese edition is licensed under CC-By. That's due
to the nature of the Japanese law, which, according to some juristic
analysis, doesn't allow to release content into the public domain.
That's not such a big problem - first of all, it might be possible to
relicense the content under CC-By-SA, or simply ask the contributors
to relicense it - since this is a new project, there aren't too many
people to ask.

But, back to the topic. The 2.5 Creative Commons licenses allow to
give the attribution NOT to every author of the article, but to the
whole project - just check 4(b) of
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/legalcode (same applies to
every other CC license).

This allows us to finally license our content under the CC-Wiki
(that's what we could call CC-By-SA 2.5) license - now the basic
questions are:

1) Do we need to license it right now?
2) Will we really choose CC-By-SA 2.5, or some other license, like
GFDL or CC-By, for example?
3) What should we do about the Wikinews projects which already have a
license choosed?

-- 
Best regards,
Dariusz "Datrio" Siedlecki