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

[Brion Vibber]

Robin Shannon wrote:
> 2005/5/22, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net>:
>>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.
>
> from [[Netscape]]
> "The Mozilla engineers decided to scrap the Communicator code and
> start over from scratch"

To clear up any misunderstandings here: until very recently the majority
of work on Mozilla was done by programmers employed by Netscape/AOL to
work on it, and that code was thus owned by Netscape/AOL whether or not
it dated back to the old Navigator or Communicator products.

 From the beginning, any contributions from third parties had to grant a
special license (Netscape Public Licence / Mozilla Public Licene) which
gave Netscape the right to include it in their proprietary
Netscape-branded browser product as well as the open-source Mozilla
releases.

When the Mozilla project (then still headquartered at Netscape/AOL) a
couple years later decided to add a GPL dual-license, Netscape/AOL was
able to unilaterally change the license on code it outright owned. It
was not able to do so on third-party submitted code for which only an
NPL/MPL license was granted to them. For those third-party
contributions, it was necessary to track down the authors and ask
permission to change the license grant.


We're similar to the Mozilla case in that we do not require third-party
contributors to assign copyright to us, so a licence change not
specified for in the licenses already granted to us would require
seeking permission from the contributor.

We're *different* from the Mozilla case in two important ways:
1) There is very little material that is owned outright by the Wikimedia
Foundation, so virtually everything would require seeking permission.

2) We accept contributions with very little information on how to
contact the author. We only rarely have e-mail addresses, and often all
we have is a pseudonym or the network address and time at which the edit
  was submitted. This makes it very hard for us to track down prior
contributors to ask permission.

</IANAL>

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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