On Fri, 2003-03-28 at 23:59, Langdon Stevenson wrote:
In any
case, do you plan to keep up the site? A Wikipedia mirror would
certainly be nice.
It would be if it respected the copyright of the text and the code. It
clearly doesn't, yet. For one thing, they need to change the name of their
mirror. But I hope they're willing to work with us to make it comply with
the GFDL.
Wikipedia is a great resource (that I have personally enjoyed contributing
information to) and we respect the work and effort that has gone into its
creation. We want to support that effort, and definitely want to comply
with the licence terms. Any assistance (by pointing out problems) you can
give us is greatly appreciated. We will modify our installation to make it
compliant.
Excellent! I'm noone official, but I've done a serious study of the
GFDL, etc. and discussed its implementation with RMS, so I have a pretty
good handle on what to do.
There are two primary obligations of a mirror/redistribution of the
Wikipedia content under the GFDL: rename it (that is, don't let visitors
think that they are seeing the Official Wikipedia), and add a "History"
page.
It gets slightly more complicated if you make your version of the site
editable; then you have to make sure that the changed source content is
regularly updated and readily available.
The "History" page would look something like this:
<h1>History</h1>
<i>Wikipedia: The Free Encylopedia</i>, 2001-2003, Wikipedia
Contributors,
http://www.wikipedia.org/ <br>
<i>InfoWrangler Wikipedia Mirror</i>, 2003, Object Positive Staff,
Object Positive
<p>The wiki source used for the InfoWrangler Wikipedia Mirror is
available at <some url>
There are also
questions about the GPL phpwiki code that are
raised, though it does seem at first blush that they're properly keeping
their code separate from ours.
Yes, we believe this is the case. InfoWrangler Server is a stand alone
application that provides a service to Wikipedia. It does not rely on any
database info, or code from Wikipedia.
We have of course modified some of the PHP code of Wikipedia so that
appropriate calls are made to InfoWrangler Server when a page is
viewed/created/edited. This is currently being packaged and will be
released to the Wikipedia development team when its ready.
Excellent. Actually, as long as the InfoWrangler code is independent of
Wikipedia, the terms of the GPL only obligate you to share modifications
of the Wikipedia code if you ever sell/redistribute that code to third
parties--not if you simply *run* the modified code.
That is, we definitely welcome any improvements/extensions to the code
you make, but simply running a modified version of the Wikipedia code
puts you under no code-sharing obligations.