[Foundation-l] We need to make it easy to fork and leave

[Ray Saintonge]

On 08/16/11 1:20 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> On 16 August 2011 09:18, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com>  wrote
>> (BTW - we *do* have someone making sure the Internet Archive - or a
>> similar organisation, if there are any similar organisations - has a
>> full collection of all our backups, so if Florida was hit by a meteor
>> tomorrow people would have something to start from?)
> argh. That's a question, not a statement. Do we have some third party
> with copies of everything? I suggest the IA as they have the disk
> space and, as a library, rabidly archive everything they can get their
> hands on.
>
One suggestion for archiving would be to have a complete set of projects 
filed with the copyright office and other key depositories quarterly.

This could also address a potential long-term copyright problem.  This 
has less to do with Wikipedia infringing on the copyrights of others 
than with the reverse.  It already happens that others use Wikipedia 
material without credit in works on which they claim copyright.  Re-use 
of that material on-wiki at a later date will inevitably result in a 
copyvio squabble, especially if the originally plundered version is no 
longer recognizable. This could be many years hence.  What other means 
are available to protect the viral nature of freely licensed material?

Forks could also be helpful in this regard.  They would need to respect 
free licences, and, as a by-product, add evidence favouring the freeness 
of the material.  A person creating a fork based on some topic area is 
unlikely to significantly alter all the articles imported, preferring to 
draw different conclusions from the same underlying facts.  This is 
bound to leave an identifiable residue that will protect the licence.

Ray