Dear all,
I'm surprised to figure out that, Codex, the new design system and Vue component library of Wikimedia, is licensed under GPL, not LGPL or a permissive license. To me, this raises several problems:
- The current license indicates that, code that uses the Vue components or design tokens from Codex has to be licensed under GPL as well. This can be problematic at times and is what LGPL is designed to solve. - I'm the maintainer of some on-wiki gadgets. Many of them are very tiny so licensing them under GPL doesn't make much sense -- in my humble opinion, GPL is designed for large projects so I usually choose a permissive license for them. If I use Codex in these projects, they can no longer be licensed under such licenses.
I sincerely hope the maintainer of Codex can clarify this issue and provide solutions, if possible.
Best regards, diskdance
I forgot to mention that, OOUI, the previous standard UI library, is licensed under MIT. I personally believe Codex, as the successor of OOUI, shares the same reason to be conservative on licensing.
Best regards, diskdance
On Friday, December 27th, 2024 at 11:47 AM, diskdance via Wikitech-l wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Dear all,
I'm surprised to figure out that, Codex, the new design system and Vue component library of Wikimedia, is licensed under GPL, not LGPL or a permissive license. To me, this raises several problems:
- The current license indicates that, code that uses the Vue components or design tokens from Codex has to be licensed under GPL as well. This can be problematic at times and is what LGPL is designed to solve.
- I'm the maintainer of some on-wiki gadgets. Many of them are very tiny so licensing them under GPL doesn't make much sense -- in my humble opinion, GPL is designed for large projects so I usually choose a permissive license for them. If I use Codex in these projects, they can no longer be licensed under such licenses.
I sincerely hope the maintainer of Codex can clarify this issue and provide solutions, if possible.
Best regards, diskdance
Il 27/12/24 05:47, diskdance via Wikitech-l ha scritto:
- I'm the maintainer of some on-wiki gadgets. Many of them are very tiny so licensing them under GPL doesn't make much sense
I sympathise and I'd often do the same, but can you elaborate? If you mean because you don't want to include the text of the GPL in your scripts, there are ways around that.
The LGPL is mostly useful when you're trying to replace a proprietary library in a proprietary piece of software which cannot be made free. When your dependencies *can* be GPL, the LGPL is actually discouraged: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
If switching our own gadgets and scripts to GPL is just an inconvenience, that's no good reason to switch Codex to LGPL. If a permissively licensed script ends up being a Codex derivative, they can be switched to GPL any time. Vice versa, if they used a more restrictive license, it might be possible to remove the additional restrictions by invoking §7. (But if they're hosted on wiki, they're probably dual licensed to CC BY-SA anyway.) https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section7
Cheers, Federico
To give more explanations, in my understanding, Codex is designed to replace OOUI which is MIT licensed. Even if to me I can just change the license of my projects, I believe there definitely exist more complex scenarios where this is not viable, which prevents them from migrating to Codex as a whole.
Best regards, diskdance
-------- Original Message -------- On 12/27/24 3:04 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Il 27/12/24 05:47, diskdance via Wikitech-l ha scritto:
- I'm the maintainer of some on-wiki gadgets. Many of them are very tiny so licensing them under GPL doesn't make much sense
I sympathise and I'd often do the same, but can you elaborate? If you mean because you don't want to include the text of the GPL in your scripts, there are ways around that.
The LGPL is mostly useful when you're trying to replace a proprietary library in a proprietary piece of software which cannot be made free. When your dependencies *can* be GPL, the LGPL is actually discouraged: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
If switching our own gadgets and scripts to GPL is just an inconvenience, that's no good reason to switch Codex to LGPL. If a permissively licensed script ends up being a Codex derivative, they can be switched to GPL any time. Vice versa, if they used a more restrictive license, it might be possible to remove the additional restrictions by invoking §7. (But if they're hosted on wiki, they're probably dual licensed to CC BY-SA anyway.) https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section7
Cheers, Federico _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
There are several Wikimedia-deployed extensions including DiscussionTools, TemplateWizard and WikiLove which use the MIT license. Requiring these extensions to switch to GPL just for using Codex seems poor form. That might not even be possible, considering that you need to get the consent of all significant contributors to switch the license.
Since Codex is relatively new, it would be more convenient for it to be dual-licensed to a GPL+MIT or GPL+Apache scheme instead.
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.*
-- SD0001
On Fri, 27 Dec 2024 at 20:56, diskdance via Wikitech-l < wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
To give more explanations, in my understanding, Codex is designed to replace OOUI which is MIT licensed. Even if to me I can just change the license of my projects, I believe there definitely exist more complex scenarios where this is not viable, which prevents them from migrating to Codex as a whole.
Best regards, diskdance
-------- Original Message -------- On 12/27/24 3:04 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Il 27/12/24 05:47, diskdance via Wikitech-l ha scritto:
- I'm the maintainer of some on-wiki gadgets. Many of them are very
tiny so licensing them under GPL doesn't make much sense
I sympathise and I'd often do the same, but can you elaborate? If you mean because you don't want to include the text of the GPL in your scripts, there are ways around that.
The LGPL is mostly useful when you're trying to replace a proprietary library in a proprietary piece of software which cannot be made free. When your dependencies *can* be GPL, the LGPL is actually discouraged: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
If switching our own gadgets and scripts to GPL is just an inconvenience, that's no good reason to switch Codex to LGPL. If a permissively licensed script ends up being a Codex derivative, they can be switched to GPL any time. Vice versa, if they used a more restrictive license, it might be possible to remove the additional restrictions by invoking §7. (But if they're hosted on wiki, they're probably dual licensed to CC BY-SA anyway.) https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#section7
Cheers, Federico _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/ _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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:
1) To clarify that Wikimedia wikis may host gadgets and user scripts licensed under GPL and not CC BY-SA.
2) 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
Not a lawyer, but my understanding:
The licence exemption refers to a project-specific license choice, e.g. Wikidata's choice for a CC0 licence. For a gadget/userscript to be published on a wiki, it must be released under that project's chosen license, CC BY-SA 4.0 for enwiki.
In response to your second point: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#MereAggregation. In this case "linking" to Codex from a gadget/userscript by using its UI elements would most probably count as a modified version and not an aggregate.
On 29 Dec 2024, at 22:35, Federico Leva (Nemo) 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 To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
- 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 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/compati...
.
- 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 To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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 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 To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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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