I think continuing the license discussion is worthwhile.
For the purpose of this conversation as I see it the WikiMedia
Foundation is providing services (defined next) to two facets of the
MediaWiki community (core and extensions developers):
a) Repository to store/revision code (svn or soon git)
b) Code review mechanism with community as participants (more for core
but usable by extensions)
c) Permissive environment where the community can help the community
(commit in on each other's code)
d) Continuous integration testing (again more for core... is this
usable by extensions somehow?)
e) Packaging for both core and extensions with backwards-compatibility
helpers (this is huge for extensions)
This is great and I hope WMF keeps providing these resources, not just
to core but also all extensions developers who would benefit. Given
that WMF is providing it, they are setting some requirements about how
and in what situations it can be used, as well as vetting who can use
it. As long as the requirements are not too strict, this seems
reasonable and doesn't devalue the service in the first place (and in
turn harm MediaWiki).
The current attitude by the MediaWik communityi as a whole to anyone
walking in on IRC (you have code? commit ASAP!), these lists (see the
message a few days ago -- just get commit access its easier if you
check these changes in yourself), and the wiki access pages themselves
(as long as you're a competent programmer, we'll take you).
Given these factors I think it's important to be as permissive as
possible in terms of licensing to allow the widest range of
contributors, while still enforcing a minimum standard that ensure the
community benefits as well from people using the services.
As you mentioned below, changing someone's license on their extension,
while sometimes legal, is definitely a no go. In my mind at that point
you're forking their project, and saying "well now you can contribute
to my fork if you like"... I don't expect such a stipulation to be
contested much.
Olivier, I'm sorry your access request didn't
go the way you hoped,
To be clear, I had spent the last 7 weeks
"justifying" my request with
no feedback. It's not about a yes/no. But more on that in another
thread, this is about licensing issues neh?
but this issue alone is enough to torpedo your access
request.
It shouldn't torpedo anything. As the community grows you will
encounter people wanting to use their own licenses on their own code
in their own modules more and more. Having a strict requirement to use
what I dare call community services is harmful to MediaWiki.
To make it clear, copyright assignments (what I had in my original
request) are common in the FOSS community, as you pointed out you
talked about them yourself on your blog and wmf talked about having
one for MediaWiki at one time. They are most common and beneficial for
GPL'ed projects that wish to dual-license. So here's question #1,
which you seem to have given your stance on, and leveraged WMF behind.
Q1. Should WMF allow Dual-Licensed extensions in the MediaWiki repo?
Is community consensus even worth gathering, or is this a "closed
issue"? If you look at a community like Wordpress, there is a lot of
commercial players involved in their plugin ecosystem. Of course they
can always host and make their own tools, but does turning them away
from community incentives to come to MediaWiki the right choice?
Q2. Should people using any OSI approved license without modification
be able to use the MediaWiki repo?
You mentioned in your mail GPL v2, BSD, MIT, LGPL (and similar) but
excluded mentioned a soft exclusion for GPL v3. This seems overly
restrictive for extensions. As some people mentioned on the lists
already, maybe just blanket approving anything OSI approved seems
wise? If you can legally fork it, it seems like that should be enough,
the community will always be able to benefit from that code. If having
the code be compatible with core licensing (so that you can fold code
in) is important, then any GPL-compatible license may work.
Q3. Should people who add a clause to their license that all
contributions are to be made under the same license be turned away?
This is similar to how the GPL comes with a clause that requires all
contributions to be GPL'ed (except with the distribution requirement,
so is still more commercial friendly). If someone adds a similar
clause to their license (say a BSD license), can they still make use
of the services? Of course given Q2 there is the issue of whether such
a clause invalidates GPL-compliance, or how it could be worded so as
not to.
And here's where I currently stand with my own work. I'm no expert on
licensing and my wording so far may not be great, but there seems to
be some concern in BSD-like licenses that without such a clause in a
shared-commit environment can lead to trouble. Zend Framework is
BSD-3-Clause'd and has a contributor agreement to handle IP issues
(and not for any dual-licensing goals).
I discussed this particular case with you in IRC, but it didn't seem
to me we were able to conclusively decide if such a clause is
warranted or not (merely that you do not support it). You've
encouraged me to bring this question of if it's even needed to the OSI
license-discuss, and I've submitted a message there, hopefully it gets
approved for discussion soon and we can have further clarification.
For my own extension I'll likely take their recommendation.
We can have a debate right here in this thread about
whether this is the right policy to have,
I think in the long run a clearer license policy for the repo is a
good thing, if nothing but to make sure people don't waste their time
trying to apply.