[Foundation-l] Re: A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

[Michael Snow]

Delirium wrote:

>> Does anyone know of collaborative projects that have actually 
>> switched licenses entirely, even in the software world?
>
> Mozilla did, and it was a huge project with thousands of 
> contributors.  They basically started emailing people asking for 
> permission to do the change, raised some publicity so hopefully some 
> people they couldn't find email addresses for would become aware of 
> the change, and then started replacing/rewriting code from people who 
> they couldn't contact or who didn't give permission.
>
> For more, see their relicensing FAQ: 
> http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html

Thank you, that was quite interesting to read through - if there are 
other similar cases, I'd love to hear about them.

One significant obstacle, of course, is that we have a lot of anonymous 
editors where it's effectively impossible to trace the person who holds 
the copyright (as opposed to the computer from which they made the 
contribution). I'm guessing that Mozilla didn't have this problem. We 
probably also have a much larger volume of people who are not 
contactable via email, since we don't require an email address in order 
to sign up for an account.

Mozilla has been at this since 2001, apparently, and it looks like they 
still have some non-relicensed code. They also inherited the right to 
relicense all Netscape-owned code, which is presumably still a 
considerable portion. The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to relicense 
content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere near that. 
And while I don't know how many people have actually contributed code to 
Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different level in terms of sheer 
numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that the relicensing process 
would not scale very well, shall we say.

The possibility of rewriting content we're unable to relicense is 
interesting to consider. It strikes me that one potential use for Magnus 
Manske's article validation tool would be to flag revisions when an 
article has been rewritten so as to remove the content that we can't 
secure permission to relicense. But anyway, if people are serious about 
actually relicensing, the longer they wait, the harder it will be.

--Michael Snow