Hi, On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Ben Finney <ben+koha@benfinney.id.au> wrote:

But it also doesn't solve the incompatibility between the Koha manual, licensed under GPL, and the Wiki content.

Why not license the wiki content also under GPL? Then the same license terms apply to all the software: programs, documentation, and wiki.

Good idea - the GPL seems to have worked OK for the manual. MJ and I discussed this a bit more on #koha yesterday, and MJ also suggested either the GPL or a free-for-all. For the sake of completeness, the other licenses that came up in the discussion include: CC-BY - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ CC0 - http://creativecommons.org/license/zero/ I now think that the GPL is the way to go. I've updated the relicensing page on the wiki (http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=relicensing); are there any other comments about the license or the voting process? Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton VP, Research & Development, LibLime galen.charlton@liblime.com p: 1-888-564-2457 x709 skype: gmcharlt

[I had intended to write about this issue earlier but I had thought that addressing the issue had been postponed until after settling some other issues. The originally proposed date for a vote passed as community attention became devoted to other issues.] I think that the basic wiki content relicensing proposal is good but there are some mistaken presumptions and the ambiguity of the ballot question needs fixing, http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=relicensing . I have a very brief examination of the history of the difficulty and a proposed remedy for the ambiguity of the ballot question. I also introduce other possibilities than relying upon the supposition of a favourable reading of the GPL to cover wiki content. I reject those other possibilities which I introduce and offer licensing under GPL 2 with the or later clause as the least worst option at the present time. 1. DIFFERENCE BETWEEK THE KOHA WIKI AND WIKIPEDIA. Wikipedia used a similar process but also had the benefit of invoking the GFDL with an or a later version clause. FSF made a specific modification to GFDL 1.3 allowing Wikipedia to switch to the CC-BY SA license. There is no similar provision in any CC-BY NC SA license allowing relicensing under the GPL. However, Wikiipedia had a specific problem about relicensing because the number of contributors are too many to have a vote which would have approached significant agreement even with the unanimous ascent of the most devoted contributors. The Koha community does not have the same problem with the Koha wiki because Koha is a relatively small community where it is much easier to obtain ascent and agreement. Obviously the Koha community was too small for people to pay enough attention to the default DokuWiki content license to recognise it as a problem at an earlier point. This is a case where it is fortunate that if the wiki is a work of joint authorship and not merely a collection of separate works then at least US legal practise would allow significant contributors to relicense the work as a whole without needing the agreement of all contributors. [I have written about the joint versus collective works issue in the absence of copyright assignment when it might go against free software interests in a thread on the koha-devel list from 2007 http://www.nabble.com/copyright-holder-ts10219512.html .] 2. AMBIGUITY OF LICENSING QUESTION. There is no precise question on the wiki relicensing ballot. Do we mean GPL 2 invoked with the or later clause as with the Koha code itself? "This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version." I suppose that we could rearrange the words to something like following in which program and software have been substituted in a way which reads well in English. "You can redistribute Koha Wiki content and/or modify the content under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version." The ambiguity issue needs addressing. Once addressed, I think that this would be the best we can reasonably do for now. This really leaves us with supposing that the GPL software license would be read correctly for covering non-software works when it would not necessarily be read in such a manner. I suspect that this supposition of favourable license reading will work in the Koha community and that there will be no real problems about it. What legal advise has been given to the Debian community about how to at least try to invoke the license well for documentation under the GPL? Documentation licensing has certainly been an inflammatory issue in the Debian community. 3. INCOMPATIBILITY BETWEEN SOFTWARE AND DOCUMENTATION LICENSES. The GPL itself is a software license with terms covering software. The language of the GPL is not compatible with other types works which are not software perhaps because the language is more carefully constructed for its copyleft purpose covering software than licenses written specifically for other types of works. There really is no clearly good available remedy because FSF have not thought the problem of creating a GPL compatible documentation license to be vexing enough in the universe of problems relating to free software to devote enough of their limited resources to addressing it. A solution for documentation licensing for people using the GPL needs an FSF solution which is one reason why invoking the license with the or later clause is a good idea. The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) was introduced for documentation but had neglected the issue of compatibility with the software license because of a need to preserve the integrity of opinions on free software in essays bound into software manuals published by FSF. Unfortunately, FSF did not consult the software development community well enough when writing the GFDL and relied to heavily on input from other publishers. FSF really recognises what a mistake that was and has fixed there processes. The process of drafting an alternative GNU Simple Free Documentation License (GSFDL) is not obtaining enough attention at FSF and may be focused on fixing the invariant sections and cover texts issue without addressing compatibility with the GPL. Anyone can make comments on the drafts for the next versions of GFDL and the proposed GSFDL and help create better versions of the licenses, http://gplv3.fsf.org/doclic-dd1-guide.html . When the GSFDL is issued, there will likely be an upgrade path for works under GFDL which lack invariant sections and cover texts. [The free software community and FSF members can certainly influence FSF but members do not control FSF or the terms of future license versions by popular vote to prevent the open membership of FSF from being subverted by opposing interests such as Microsoft had used in subverting the ISO standards process over OOXML.] 4. DISJUNCTIVE DUAL LICENSING. I consider and reject the idea of two following possibilities for disjunctive dual licensing as a remedy for the problem of licensing the wiki content. Bradley Kuhn likes the use of 'disjunctive' for authors choosing multiple licenses and users having their choice of any or all of the multiple licenses used by authors. Perl uses disjuntive dual licensing under both the Artistic License and the GPL. [Bradley distinguishes disjunctive from what he supposes that most people refer to simply as a dual licensing in a 'core source' business model disfavouring free software. In the 'core source' business model, a company controlling all the copyright to a significant base of code may produce a community version under a free software license and a version with additional features under a proprietary license.] Disjunctive dual licensing wiki content under both GPL 2 or later and CC-BY SA unported 3.0 or later might address the problem. 4.1. GLOBAL DISJUNCTIVE DUAL LICENSING. I will refer to user choice of license for outside of the wiki where the content inside the wiki is automatically under multiple licenses applying to every wiki page as global disjunctive dual licensing. Some people such as Bradley Kuhn encourage software projects to take such an approach for documentation but he also knows that it is not really an adequate remedy. The idea in such a case would be that you would allow the user to use the content outside the wiki in a choice any or all specified licenses. There would then be both the software license for any code and a non-software license for any other content. Such a remedy may be fine for code originating in the wiki. However we should not assume that the authorship of wiki content will originate with people contributing directly to the wiki. Code including help file texts embodied as code could not be copied from the Koha code into the wiki if the wiki allowed the CC-BY SA license which is not as strong or as precise a copyleft license as the GPL and therefore incompatible with the GPL. Pierrick Le Gall had a proposal from 2006 to have special pages in the wiki used to contribute contextual help and better translations which would have help text copied between the wiki and Koha in ways where no one had noticed the license incompatibility problem. The GPL licenses are fairly inclusive in allowing the incorporation of works under other more permissive licenses. However, even any possibility of including CC-BY SA works as part of a work as a whole under the GPL would be a one way possibility if the CC-BY SA parts would be modified under the terms of the GPL for the work as a whole. 4.1. MARKED DISJUNCTIVE DUAL LICENSING. Providing GPL 2 or later and CC-BY SA or later as a default unless marked otherwise as only GPL X or later is a possibility with much appeal for me. However, it may be too easy for people to forget to mark appropriately even in the minority of cases where needed without strong support in the wiki code itself for assisting with the process. I think that such marking would overly complicate contribution to the wiki. If we ever need such a feature as with any possible license upgrade in even some alternative builds of Koha under GPL 3 or AGPL 3, we could create a parallel wiki with a different default license invoked. 5. CONCLUSION. Perhaps question on relicensing the wiki should read as follows. Should we relicense the wiki content as follows? "You can redistribute Koha Wiki content and/or modify the content under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version." We ought to seek legal advise about such matters. The FSF would advise against it as advocates for appropriate use of the license that is their position. The Software Freedom Law Center might have a similar answer but at least the Software Freedom Law Center may be inclined to give a more nuanced answer to the extent that it would not be a conflict of interest given that they are council to FSF. Thomas Dukleth Agogme 109 E 9th Street, 3D New York, NY 10003 USA http://www.agogme.com +1 212-674-3783 On Thu, May 7, 2009 12:25, Galen Charlton wrote:

Hi,

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Ben Finney <ben+koha@benfinney.id.au> wrote:

...

But it also doesn't solve the incompatibility between the Koha manual, licensed under GPL, and the Wiki content.

Why not license the wiki content also under GPL? Then the same license terms apply to all the software: programs, documentation, and wiki.

Good idea - the GPL seems to have worked OK for the manual. MJ and I discussed this a bit more on #koha yesterday, and MJ also suggested either the GPL or a free-for-all. For the sake of completeness, the other licenses that came up in the discussion include:

CC-BY - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ CC0 - http://creativecommons.org/license/zero/

I now think that the GPL is the way to go. I've updated the relicensing page on the wiki (http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=relicensing); are there any other comments about the license or the voting process?

Regards,

Galen -- Galen Charlton VP, Research & Development, LibLime galen.charlton@liblime.com p: 1-888-564-2457 x709 skype: gmcharlt _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha

My previous message on the issue of Koha wiki content relicensing had caused unintended confusion for some as I attempted to make up for my lack of earlier comment. The wording deficiency in the wiki content relicensing ballot has been fixed. I tried to be clear that I really had only that simple request at the beginning of my previous message. I am all in favour of relicensing the wiki content under GPL 2 or later.

From 9-11 October, I urge everyone who has contributed a wiki page or 5 or more edits to login and vote in favour of relicensing at http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=relicensing .

Any other legal fine points which I raised in my previous message are nothing more than mere fine points, given the lack of viable alternatives. My previous message described the lack of alternatives at some length. Although somewhat awkward, much of the free software world rightly prefers licensing documentation and content similar to the wiki under the GPL. The default DokuWiki content license, CC-BY NC SA, is a configuration option in DokuWiki which was never examined by the Koha project for configuring differently. The license is not compatible with the GPL. The use of that license is essentially an accident of installing DokuWiki and not examining all the configuration options. If the matter is left uncorrected, it could hold back the project in future. Please vote. The remainder of my reply is inline: On Thu, October 8, 2009 15:03, MJ Ray wrote:

Thomas Dukleth wrote:

...

I have a very brief examination of the history of the difficulty and a proposed remedy for the ambiguity of the ballot question.

I think that the email was not very brief.

Sorry for my poor wording. I had intended to state only that my treatment of the history was fairly brief but that is still a relative term.

It seems unhelpful to send a ~2000 word essay late in the process.

I needed to make comment when I had the opportunity to think well on the matter. Lack of updates to the wiki page had confused me about when the issue would be put forward again and I do sometimes miss some comments in IRC meetings. I know that others have also missed some of my comments during meetings in the past. My main goal was to quickly encourage clarity on the ballot and not to disrupt the process in any way. I think that if the ballot question is posed with complete clarity as it is now there is no problem. My secondary goal was to present an argument at length about why I believe that an affirmative vote on the ballot question is the best solution available. [...]

I asked for wikis to be GPL in the general meeting on 2005-05-21, before the main one moved to Dokuwiki. I feel that the Koha community was paying attention, but wasn't careful enough then and now we are dealing with the consequences.

I applaud your early attention to the issue. I know that it is difficult to persuade others to pay attention to such issues to avoid issues such as license compatibility problems. [...]

[...]

...

2. AMBIGUITY OF LICENSING QUESTION.

There is no precise question on the wiki relicensing ballot. Do we mean GPL 2 invoked with the or later clause as with the Koha code itself? [...]

Yes, that is what we mean. The ballot has been updated. That was mentioned in yesterday's meeting, so an attendee mentioning it here too seems a bit strange.

I believed that I knew what was meant but the ballot had previously referred to a history of the matter without a simple clear question which seemed ambiguous to me. [...]

...

I suppose that we could rearrange the words to something like following in which program and software have been substituted in a way which reads well in English.

[...]

No. The wiki is software and program is a word defined in the GPLv2. It seems like an unnecessary risk to replace them with more ambiguous words like "content".

This issue is awkward but one in which free software communities should have no real problem. The document content created by the users of a program is usually not considered part of the program nor a derived work of the program, and therefore, not necessarily covered by the same license as the program itself. In the case of a wiki, I can see an argument that the formatting and arrangement of the content might fall under the license for the wiki program itself. In any case, the concern is significantly about reuse of the content outside the wiki and possibly divorced from factors which would have been a necessary product of the wiki program itself. The data vs. code distinction is recognised by the DokuWiki developers. DokuWiki code is available under GPL 2 but not under a CC license. However, the default license for content and designated as such as set by the footer license option is CC-BY NC SA, which is not compatible with the GPL and the basis of our problem. GPL is not even available as a configuration option for the content license appearing in the footer, therefore, we will have to modify the DocuWiki code or add a custom template to provide a GPL 2 or later statement for the footer. [...]

...

[...] We ought to seek legal advise about such matters. [...]

Feel free.

Seeking legal advice on such matters is a good idea in future but because of the data vs. code aspect of this issue I doubt it would inform us of anything significant that we do not already know to manage for the relicensing process. I think that it was inappropriate for me to raise the issue of seeking legal advice at this stage to inform us of answers which we can anticipate. I tried to explain in my previous message that the answers which we could anticipate on this issue would not be likely to be helpful. [...] Again, I urge those who have contributed a page or 5 or more edits to login and vote in favour of relicensing the Koha wiki content under GPL 2 or later at http://wiki.koha.org/doku.php?id=relicensing from 9 -11 October. Thomas Dukleth Agogme 109 E 9th Street, 3D New York, NY 10003 USA http://www.agogme.com +1 212-674-3783