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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Michael Snow wrote:

> 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 

Hoi,
If you read the subjectline you will see it is not as impossible as it 
seems. The number of contributors of Wiktionary is of a completely 
different order of magnitude. Less people. And the problems that there 
are when converting to the Ultimate Wiktionary are different as well. 
Please read the original post and you will see that noone asked to 
re-license the WIKIPEDIA content.
Thanks,
    GerardM