On 6/16/14, Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 1:25 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
So from what I understand, there's now been an amendment to WMF's terms of use to require disclosure of paid "contributions" [1]. Its a little unclear how this applies to MediaWiki as a project, but a literal reading of the policy makes it seem like MediaWiki is included.
- MediaWiki is arguably a project of the Wikimedia foundation. The
foundation's website says as much [2] *A commit/patchset certainly seems like a contribution.
Thus the new policy would require anyone submitting code to use to declare who they work for.
The terms of use is basically a clickwrap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickwrap agreement, right? When you make a contribution, you see "by clicking you accept blah blah blah" somewhere, once you click knowing that, you made a sort of contract from a legal point of view. So the terms of use only applies to you if you do actually see that piece of text, which does not seem to be present on mediawiki.org, nor on gerrit.wikimedia.org, and obviously not in the git interface when you are pushing a patch. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Perhaps not. But there is a big difference between unenforceable due to lack of notice, and actually not intending the ToU to apply to a specific action. The document itself seems to claim that it applies to the MediaWiki software project (although its not 100% clear). Even if you didn't click it when running git-review, you've probably clicked through it when contributing to some other Wikimedia project.
Even if one accepts the interpretation it doesn't apply to code commits as its not linked in the footer of gerrit, I think there's enough ambiguity here that we should do something about it.
--bawolff