Hi diskdance et al–
I’ve filed a Phabricator task to discuss re-licensing Codex to MIT or similar here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T383077
I don’t think anyone on the Design System Team (which maintains Codex) is opposed to this, but if anyone here would like to weigh in please consider commenting on that task and we will keep an eye on the discussion. In the absence of any good reason *not* to do this, we can probably make such a change in the next 1-2 Codex releases (which happen every 2 weeks).
Best,
Eric
—
Eric Gardner Senior Software Engineer, Design System Team Wikimedia Foundation egardner@wikimedia.org mailto:egardner@wikimedia.org
On Dec 29, 2024, at 9:44 PM, diskdance via Wikitech-l wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi folks, can we stay on topic? We are discussing Codex licensing problems (GPL as a strongly copyleft license) for use in other projects like gadgets, not something else. Thank you.
Best regards, diskdance
On Monday, December 30th, 2024 at 1:38 AM, David Lynch dlynch@wikimedia.org wrote:
- To clarify that Wikimedia wikis may host gadgets and user scripts
licensed under GPL and not CC BY-SA.
We'd need some technical changes to make that possible on top of the policy changes, I think? Insofar as submitting a JS page currently gets the exact same licensing blurb above the publish button as all other wiki content, so there's currently no way to submit something *without* licensing it as (generally, depending on project) CC-BY-SA4+GDFL. Apart from arguably using Special:Import for all edits, I guess, but almost nobody is allowed to use that.
(There's probably a bunch of other complications about having some random bits of on-wiki content licensed differently, given usage of the database dumps by various people. But that's for the lawyers to think about.)
On Sun, Dec 29, 2024 at 7:35 AM Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki@gmail.com mailto:nemowiki@gmail.com> wrote:
Il 27/12/24 18:17, Siddharth VP ha scritto:
Also, some concerns have been raised previously about GPL not being compatible with CC-BY-SA. Since all code hosted on-wiki are implicitly under CC-BY-SA, they cannot also be GPL-licensed, *meaning that gadgets and user scripts cannot use Codex at all.*
Is the premise of this theory that gadgets and user scripts *must* in all cases be licensed under CC BY-SA? That's incorrect, as https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Terms_of_Use#7 makes plainly clear, because various cases exist where other licenses apply. Of course you can't take GPL code as is and expect to relicense it under CC BY-SA, but that's not necessary.
It seems we have already two interesting questions for WMF legal:
- To clarify that Wikimedia wikis may host gadgets and user scripts
licensed under GPL and not CC BY-SA.
- In which cases a user script or gadget using Codex would trigger
§5(3) https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section5 [as opposed to creating a mere "aggregate"].
There's no need to rush any decisions until such questions are answered.
On (1) I'll note:
- This can leverage the ToS provision that «The only exception is if the
Project edition or feature requires a different license. In that case, you agree to license any text you contribute under the particular license prescribed by the Project edition or the feature.»
- Conversion from CC BY-SA to GPLv3 for legacy content is explicitly
allowed by the importing clause thanks to the one-way compatibility: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-considerations/compatible-licenses/.
- The text import clause is not particularly useful for GPL text because
the compatibility is one way.
- I would not recommend having GFDL-only code, though it may be allowed
by the terms of use.
Best, Federico _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org mailto:wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org mailto:wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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