Hi Parker, thanks for your reply. See comments within.
"Parker Conrad" parker@wikinvest.com wrote in message news:b340aa380709181127i2416aadtc72b9628f9455da0@mail.gmail.com...
Hey guys -- someone posted a question / objection to Wikinvest's terms of service a while back. I'm one of the cofounders of Wikinvest, but as I'm not subscribed to Wikitech-l, I didn't hear about it until now. Anyway, I wanted to address Mark Clements' concerns (full text below for those who don't remember). To answer some (and apologize for others!):
- The modifications Wikinvest made to MediaWiki are not GPL (this isn't a
requirement of the GPL license) -- although, we're interested in giving back to the community. It was so helpful to have this great platform (MediaWiki) for us to build on and we'd love to contribute some of the stuff we've built on top of it back. There's a bunch of stuff we've built on top of the platform -- anyone have any suggestions for what we be useful to others? Of the stuff we've built, what do you guys want and think would be useful to the project?
I am not sure whether private modifications that are only used internally are required to be released to the public under the GPL. Simetrical seems to imply not, whilst Voice of All's reply seems to imply that you do. I am also unsure as to whether using modified code on a public sites constitutes public distribution. I guess you should consult your lawyers on that one (though I guess you already have...)
Of course, if you are right and there is no _requirement_ to release your code, that doesn't stop you from doing so if you choose to, and the community would be grateful, I'm sure. The site has a lot of nice functionality, and a beautiful skin, but I would need to dig a bit deeper to be able to make any recommendations about things that might be useful elsewhere. My glib reaction would be 'all of it!' :-)
- The fact that we didn't have clear, visible attribution to MediaWiki
and the community that built it is really not cool on our part -- I apologize for that. I can only say that it was not an attempt to "hide" our use of MediaWiki, it was more an "oh my god we're working 18-hour days 7 days a week for launch" and we didn't understand the attribution requirements / forgot to properly give credit. Thanks for pointing it out, my apologies again, and there's now a big button on every page on our site that specifies we are "powered by MediaWiki" and gives credit where it's due.
No probs. Thanks for doing that. As I said originally, I'm not sure whether this is a requirement of the license or not. It would be good if "someone who knows" (tm) could clarify that for future situations.
- Our help content was borrowed from Wikipedia -- I unfortunately didn't
quite understand the requirements on how the attribution should work. The attribution now links to the original Wikipedia content, the article history (to credit all the contributors), the GFDL license on Wikipedia, and also specifies that all our help content is GFDL'd, which I think covers all the requirements but let me know if I'm still messing it up.
Again, IANAL, but I think the attribution should appear on every copied page (not just the contents), with a link back to the equivalent page on the site it was copied from. This would probably be easy to acheive by making the attribution footer on Help:Contents into a template, and adding it manually to the bottom of the relevant pages. You would pass the source page as an argument so the link goes to the right place.
Anyway, hopefully I've got all this right now, and I hope there are no hard feelings. If you have any other suggestions for the site (and if any of you guys are interested in potentially joining us) please let me know...
No hard feelings at all! It's great to have people responding so well to this kind of stuff. Cheers, and good luck!
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)