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!):
1) 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?
2) 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.
3) 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.
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...
Parker
--------------------
Mark Clements <gmane at kennel17.co.uk <wikitech-l%40lists.wikimedia.org?Subject=%5BWikitech-l%5D%20Wikinvest%20is%20looking%20for%20world%20class%20developers%0A%09whoare%20passionate%20about%20wikis%20and%20want%20to%20extend%20mediawiki&In-Reply-To=>> wrote:
Point 8 in the terms of service[1] includes the line (emphasis mine): "You may not modify, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly display or in any way exploit, any of the content, SOFTWARE, and/or materials available on Wikinvest, in whole or in part, except as expressly provided in Nvest's policies and procedures made available via Wikinvest."
Isn't this a violation of the GPL for MediaWiki. Or perhaps it is referring to some other software (in which case clarification is probably required)?
In addition I found no mention that the site was powered by MediaWiki and that the software, including any modifications you have made, is available under the GPL. I am unsure whether this is a requirement, though - perhaps someone can clarify that.
Finally, there is a lot of help content that has been copied from Wikipedia, and aside from a 'thank you' on the contents page[2] there is no attribution. These pages need a clear link to the source article, and to the full GFDL text. Also, it should be noted that all edits made to these pages are also (by definition) licensed under the GFDL. If it would make things easier, there are some public domain help pages being developed at mediawiki.org [3], which aren't quite as good or as thorough, but which may be used without attribution. - Mark Clements (HappyDog)
[1] http://www.wikinvest.com/site/Terms_of_Service [2] http://www.wikinvest.com/help/Contents [3] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Contents
On 9/18/07, Parker Conrad parker@wikinvest.com wrote:
- The modifications Wikinvest made to MediaWiki are not GPL (this isn't a
requirement of the GPL license)
Well, not as long as you don't distribute them. As soon as you distribute them to anyone at all (outside your own organization), you need to release them under the GPL, with everything that implies. That's kind of the point of the GPL. :) (Of course, that only applies if the modifications are actually integrated with MediaWiki, not if they're separate applications that happen to use the same database, for instance.)
"Some of the most successful OSS technology is licensed under the GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL mandates that any software that incorporates source code already licensed under the GPL will itself become subject to the GPL. When the resulting software product is distributed, its creator must make the entire source code base freely available to everyone, at no additional charge. This viral aspect of the GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it. It also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distribution."
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/05-03sharedsource.mspx
....Mission Accomplished (tm) ;D
Simetrical-3 wrote:
On 9/18/07, Parker Conrad parker@wikinvest.com wrote:
- The modifications Wikinvest made to MediaWiki are not GPL (this isn't
a requirement of the GPL license)
Well, not as long as you don't distribute them. As soon as you distribute them to anyone at all (outside your own organization), you need to release them under the GPL, with everything that implies. That's kind of the point of the GPL. :) (Of course, that only applies if the modifications are actually integrated with MediaWiki, not if they're separate applications that happen to use the same database, for instance.)
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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)
2007/9/19, Mark Clements gmane@kennel17.co.uk:
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...)
You're not legally required to release anything if you're using a (modified) GPL'ed program to power a public website: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedMods
However, as you say, it would still be the right thing to do, just in order to get that warm fuzzy feeling of having given back to the community that gave you so much that you could build on. :)
On 19/09/2007, Schneelocke schneelocke@gmail.com wrote:
You're not legally required to release anything if you're using a (modified) GPL'ed program to power a public website: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnreleasedMods However, as you say, it would still be the right thing to do, just in order to get that warm fuzzy feeling of having given back to the community that gave you so much that you could build on. :)
Defaulting to releasing stuff rather than not releasing stuff (i.e. release everything by default unless there's some extremely good reason not to) is also of direct benefit to a site, and particularly to try to get stuff into the mainline distro. This benefits you because it saves on maintenance, gets more eyes on the code and avoids maintaining increasingly divergent patch sets yourselves. And means your organisation gets good reputation value as contributors to the codebase in question.
In the case of MediaWiki, doing new stuff as extensions where possible and putting a page on mediawiki.org for it. There's some *amazing* stuff for MediaWiki, far beyond what you see on Wikimedia sites.
- d.
2007/9/19, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
Defaulting to releasing stuff rather than not releasing stuff (i.e. release everything by default unless there's some extremely good reason not to) is also of direct benefit to a site, and particularly to try to get stuff into the mainline distro. This benefits you because it saves on maintenance, gets more eyes on the code and avoids maintaining increasingly divergent patch sets yourselves. And means your organisation gets good reputation value as contributors to the codebase in question.
Hear, hear!
Indeed, there's lots of sound reasons for releasing your modifications.
- 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?
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!' :-)
OK... not everything we've done modularizes very well, and the realities of capacity would mean we'd probably need to start with one component and move from there. And, some stuff (like the charts) probably doesn't make sense for anything but a stock wiki that has a stock data feed, so it probably doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time turning that into an extension. Anything in particular that people see that would be *most* desired so we'd be able to prioritize?
/prc
"Parker Conrad" parker@wikinvest.com wrote in message news:b340aa380709191559m27f74addwaec32bb8be693ac4@mail.gmail.com...
- 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?
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!' :-)
OK... not everything we've done modularizes very well, and the realities
of
capacity would mean we'd probably need to start with one component and
move
from there. And, some stuff (like the charts) probably doesn't make sense for anything but a stock wiki that has a stock data feed, so it probably doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time turning that into an extension. Anything in particular that people see that would be *most* desired so
we'd
be able to prioritize?
Sure - I understand that. I haven't looked into it in enough detail to answer your question, nor do I necessarily know what would be of a wide benefit (as opposed to things that I would personally find useful) but perhaps there are others here who would be able to give a useful response.
The only thing that leaps out at me is the skin, but that is less of a coding issue than one of design. Also the dynamic links to companies and concepts on the main page are pretty cool! :-)
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)
Just a small question, but wouldn't using it to power a website that others use constitute distribution and trigger the viral license? I always took in house to mean used only by internal users. Companies like tivo got around this by modularizing their software to a large extent and releasing the base but not the modules? I could be very wrong here, and it's not an accusation by any means, im just curious :)
On 9/19/07, Brock Weller brock.weller@gmail.com wrote:
Just a small question, but wouldn't using it to power a website that others use constitute distribution and trigger the viral license?
Generally, no, because you're not distributing the software, you're distributing the output of the software.
However, sometimes this isn't true with website software, as parts of the software *are* distributed (the CSS files, for instance). I have no idea how this applies to mediawiki in particular.
On 9/19/07, Brock Weller brock.weller@gmail.com wrote:
Just a small question, but wouldn't using it to power a website that others use constitute distribution and trigger the viral license?
Not according to the interpretation of the Free Software Foundation, as explained in the GPL FAQ at http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html. A separate license endorsed by the FSF, the Affero GPL, more or less adds this restriction, saying roughly that if you use modifications to serve data on a network you have to release those modifications as well.
The interface, however, would have to be released under the GPL if it's derived from the base MediaWiki interface, or so I understand it. The same is in all likelihood true for in-house JS libraries and so forth. Given that, I've often wondered whether the same must not apply to content -- if we were more careful about copyright we would probably write that as an exception into our licensing terms, for the interface files at least. It's definitely not intended to apply to content, though (which would put Wikipedia in violation, since the GFDL is not GPL-compatible!), so you might take that as an implicit license even if technically we should have a special exemption.
Simetrical wrote:
The interface, however, would have to be released under the GPL if it's derived from the base MediaWiki interface, or so I understand it. The same is in all likelihood true for in-house JS libraries and so forth.
Interesting point. Are the js linked to the server code? By the usual definition, i'd say no, as they run on a different process and even different computer. But given that the server code relies on it, sometimes very tightly, it's dubious. Is JavaScript sent to view a site "distributed", or remains "used internally"? IMHO cases which provide a new full functionality, like some user scripts gfiving page preview, are a separate work and sending them to the user client, distributes it. I'm fine with treating short and dumb snippets, like detecting cookies or if javascript is enabled as if they were part of the server code, but they would be inelligible :/
Given that, I've often wondered whether the same must not apply to content -- if we were more careful about copyright we would probably write that as an exception into our licensing terms, for the interface files at least. It's definitely not intended to apply to content, though (which would put Wikipedia in violation, since the GFDL is not GPL-compatible!), so you might take that as an implicit license even if technically we should have a special exemption.
A document written with OpenOffice is not under the LGPL. Compiling a program with gcc doesn't make it GPL. Writting a text in MediaWiki doesn't make it GPL.* I am not so sure about the Mediawiki: messages, which should probably be released under a Public Domain / Only-attribution license.
*Unless they fall under those license by any other reason, like linking with a GPL library or adding the text to a wiki which requires it to be GDFL.
On 9/20/07, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Simetrical wrote:
The interface, however, would have to be released under the GPL if it's derived from the base MediaWiki interface, or so I understand it. The same is in all likelihood true for in-house JS libraries and so forth.
Interesting point. . . .
Well, I think I'll drop this here, to avoid this becoming too much like ianal-lawyers-l. :) I don't think any MW devs are interested in suing anyone who isn't grossly abusing the GPL, if any of us would be inclined to bother even then (I doubt it).
Well, I think I'll drop this here, to avoid this becoming too much like ianal-lawyers-l. :) I don't think any MW devs are interested in suing anyone who isn't grossly abusing the GPL, if any of us would be inclined to bother even then (I doubt it).
Agreed. Asking nicely for a copy of the source code of anything you are interested in doesn't involve as many lawyers, which makes it far preferable in my book.
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