This would be a good topic to bring up in the next community chat.
On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 1:21 PM, Sam Kuper sam.kuper@uclmail.net wrote:
On 21/03/2017, Martin Roth gaumless@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a reason we shouldn't switch to CC BY 4.0?
Arguably, yes: doing so would permit the use of Coreboot wiki material in proprietary works, which some wiki contributors might be opposed to.
Do these licenses separate the notions of "proprietary" and "commercial?" For example, a hardware vendor might wish to sell a device that uses coreboot and write the manual using some wiki content. That aligns perfectly with the project and I think we should strive toward removing legal obstacles for such cases.
AIUI, the GFDL would require the vendor to append or archive the original wiki article in such cases (assuming >100 copies are made). It's kind of a silly impediment to impose if we're trying to increase adoption, IMO.
It would also prevent importing material from Wikipedia or Stack Exchange into the Coreboot wiki.
I think the flow usually goes the other way, from coreboot.org to other places. For cases where it's the opposite direction, we can still link to Wikipedia or SE rather than reprinting, or perhaps seek permission from the author to post under the license chosen for coreboot.org.
- Do we really care what Stack Exchange or any other group is using?
How much are we copying from them?
At the moment, I don't know of any Coreboot wiki content that was copied from SE or Wikipedia.
*nod*
But as Coreboot becomes more popular, the likelihood increases that someone might post an answer on SE, or a description on Wikipedia, that is good enough that it is worth including it (either verbatim or appropriately edited) in the Coreboot wiki. For such inclusion to be possible, the Coreboot wiki's license obviously needs to be compatible with SE's license and Wikipedia's license.
We could just ask the author's permission in those cases, right? While sub-optimal, I think it could be worth the tradeoff to use the more permissive license so that we optimize for the general case and then handle corner cases as needed.
As an aside: it is certainly possible in principle to dual-license (or even triple-license, etc) the Coreboot wiki's content. So, Coreboot could, for instance, decide to use CC BY-SA 3.0 *and* GFDL, with the licensee allowed to choose whichever they prefer. On the plus side, this would avoid the community having to choose between them (i.e. it avoids the "versus" aspect of the discussion you linked to). On the down side, it would prevent bi-directional compatibility with SE, as I pointed out here: https://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2017-March/083614.html .
Seems overly complicated IMO. For simplicity's sake it would be nice to use a single license for coreboot.org that satisfies the most users and those who strongly disagree can post elsewhere (maybe libreboot/librecore) and link to it.
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David Hendricks