473566 - wiki.mozilla.org should use CC licenses instead of GNU FDL

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Websites :: wiki.mozilla.org, defect)

Description

[Frank Hecker]

wiki.mozilla.org currently states that content on the site is licensed under the GNU FDL:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/MozillaWiki:About
https://wiki.mozilla.org/MozillaWiki:Copyrights

In my opinion we should be following the same practices as developer.mozilla.org and using Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike as the default license:

https://developer.mozilla.org/Project:Copyrights

This would avoid potential problems when moving content from wiki.mozilla.org to developer.mozilla.org.

Reed, again please feel free to re-assign this as appropriate. Note also that IMO we should get Harvey Anderson involved because of the licensing issues. I think we have a route to just make this change and consider the current wiki.mozilla.org content relicensed under a CC license (basically follow what was done with Wikipedia), but this has some issues that need to be considered.

Comment 1

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

It's a wiki... ;)

Unless something needs to be done on the server-side, there's nothing that I can do that you can't do yourself.

Comment 2

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

However, I did find a few server-side settings for this one...

## For attaching licensing metadata to pages, and displaying an
## appropriate copyright notice / icon. GNU Free Documentation
## License and Creative Commons licenses are supported so far.
# $wgEnableCreativeCommonsRdf = true;
$wgRightsPage = ""; # Set to the title of a wiki page that describes your license/copyright
$wgRightsUrl = "";
$wgRightsText = "";
$wgRightsIcon = "";
# $wgRightsCode = ""; # Not yet used

I have no idea what the $wgRights* stuff is (check mediawiki.org), but it looks like $wgEnableCreativeCommonsRdf might be useful.

Comment 3

[Frank Hecker]

I didn't want to change this myself because it's in effect a licensing policy change. We need to make a formal decision to establish CC-BY-SA as the new default, and we need a plan for what to do with the existing content.

I don't think we've ever established a formal module owner for licensing policy, so this may default to Mitchell.

Comment 4

[Shawn Thompson]

GFDL 1.3 can allow this though without needing permission, but we have to make this decision by August.

Comment 5

[Logan Rosen [:Logan]]

MozillaWiki:Copyrights currently states:
> All contributions to MozillaWiki are under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA) version 3.0 or any later version.

Thus, I am resolving this as WFM.