On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 9:38 PM, Martin Peeks martinp23@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.