- The Wikimedia principles [1] require all projects to be public domain, CC-BY or CC-BY-SA.

- The Cloud Services ToU [2] requires all hosted content to comply with the Wikimedia licensing policy [3] which requires all content to be under a free license, with very limited exceptions (which were meant to only apply to media files, although that's not stated explicitly). Note that it also requires an explicit copyright policy, which Wikispore does not have, so we don't allow non-free files either, at least for now.

- In practice, different licences means text cannot be combined and the provenance of text must be strictly tracked. That might make sense for a Wikisource-type use case but not much else.

- The rules of using content placed by its author under a free license are identical across all jurisdictions. Fair use and similar exceptions which allow content to be used without the author's permission are very much not. They also tend to be unclear (see e.g. the four-factor fair use test [4] used in US law). That creates legal risk for the people operating the servers.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Founding_principles

[2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitech:Cloud_Services_Terms_of_use#What_uses_of_Cloud_Services_do_we_not_like?

[3] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy

[4] https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 2:41 PM Željko Blaće <zblace@mi2.hr> wrote: