[Toolserver-l] Changes to expired accounts web hosting

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 9:38 PM, Martin Peeks <martinp23 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> However, I feel that toolserver users should retain the *freedom* to
> choose how to license projects. Perhaps the docs and so on ought to be
> adjusted to emphasise the importance and value of free licensing, but
> there should be no automatic compulsion by dint of ToS to give certain
> freedoms to one's work. While I, certainly, would open source any
> further Wikimedia related tools I were to write, I strongly feel this
> should be a matter of personal preference.

At a minimum, though, this should be opt-out, just for pragmatic
reasons.  The problem isn't that TS users don't want to freely license
their tools, it's that they vanish and we don't have the opportunity
to ask them.  If we said "All your tools are GPLv3 or later, unless
you specifically say otherwise", then most tools would end up being
freely-licensed, and when someone disappears, someone else could take
over the tool.

I wouldn't have any problem at all with saying that if you want to
write closed-source software related to Wikimedia, you can do it on
your own dime and not using Wikimedia-DE's hardware, software, or
administration budget.  But it's not my decision to make, of course.