Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/wiki-licensing

• Created: 11/11/2005 by MatthewEast

• Contributors: MatthewEast, HenrikOmma, MatthewPaulThomas

• Packages affected: None.

Feel free to discuss this page on the [http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc Documentation Team mailing list] or at the bottom of the page.

Summary

The progress of the better-wiki-docs spec provides a good occasion to reevaluate the licensing of "documentation" that appears on the Ubuntu wiki. There is currently no licensing policy expressed on the wiki and this has caused confusion. This spec attempts to develop a licensing policy which ensures that material contributed to wiki pages can be used freely in Ubuntu Official Documentation, and elsewhere, without any copyright restrictions.

Rationale

The wiki does not currently contain any express definition of licensing policy. This means:

• There is confusion about whether material can or cannot be copied (for example into official Ubuntu documentation released in the distribution). ArguablyFootNote(It is probably true that people who post on the wiki can be taken to have impliedly waived their intellectual property rights of the material or alternatively have granted a licence to use the material freely by their conduct of posting to a "wiki", but we don't want to have to get into these sort of arguments!), it can be, but "arguably" is not good enough, we need clarity, for the Documentation Team, for the contributors and for the users.

There is therefore a need to avoid [http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/2005-November/004222.html this sort of confusion] and establish a licensing policy which enables material posted on the wiki to be freely modified and redistributed, while retaining attribution rights which are proportionate to the fact that the wiki is a collaborative effort by all the community.

We also need to consider whether to permit users to derogate from the licences: if a user wants to write a page on the wiki but retain copyright over it, should he be allowed to do so? My view on this is no, for reasons of principle (the wiki should be a collaborative effort, users who wish to retain copyright are free to publish material on their own sites) and practicality (it would be difficult to implement a system where copyrighted material is conveniently locked down to prevent editing by others).

A related but in reality discrete issue is whether the wiki documentation should discourage author attribution. Documentation is generally not helped by having the author's name on the top, which can in fact be distracting. On the wiki, it can also stop others from hacking on a page. Where others have contributed, it is impossible to keep track of all the contributors in a long list of authors. For this reason I think the general policy should be against author attribution on the pages.

Use cases

• Chiara works on the [http://doc.ubuntu.com Ubuntu Documentation Team]. She is writing a section of the [:DesktopGuide:Ubuntu Desktop Starter Guide] about multimedia support. She would like to use the material from the wiki page MultimediaApplications, but is unsure of whether she will be breaching copyright by doing so.

• Anthony wants to work on the Ubuntu Wiki by contributing a guide, but is only prepared to do so on the basis that he retains copyright in the work and he wishes to find out whether this is possible on the Ubuntu wiki.

Design

• Write a simple licence which makes material on the wiki completely free.
• Make the user aware of this fact: that they are putting any material in the public domain by posting to the wiki.

Implementation

• Put licence like this on a prominently linked wiki page, or in the footer:

  You are free to copy, modify, distribute, display and make commercial use of material which you find on this wiki

• Further or alternatively, add the details to [http://www.ubuntu.com/legal the website legal page] and link to it from prominent areas of the wiki.

• In order to achieve the second objective (making users aware of the licensing they are posting under, we could add some Moin code to make it more clear: when creating, editing and/or saving a page we could notify the user of the licensing terms with the following message:

  Please note: the material you post to this wiki will be in the public domain and therefore available to others to modify or copy. This eliminates any copyrights in the material. If you are copying material from another source, please ensure you have the right to do so under these terms.

• Remove author attribution, where it exists, from the documents, see "Outstanding Issues".

Outstanding issues

• Suggested text: "Inlude only text that you wrote yourself, or that you know is public domain. By submitting your contribution, you accept that you are dedicating it to the public domain." Or for a more thorough license, link to the [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication]. -- MatthewPaulThomas

• Get opinion of CommunityCouncil

• What to do with documents which currently contain author attribution: can we simply nuke the attribution, or do we make an effort at contacting authors to give them a chance to remove their contributions before doing so?