[Koha] RFC: relicense wiki.koha.org

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

Content on the Koha wiki (http://wiki.koha.org/) is currently
available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share
Alike 3.0 Unported license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).  MJ Ray has
pointed out on #koha that this is a problem.  I agree with him for the
following reasons:

* The non-commercial use clause prevents any commercial entity from
reusing content from the wiki (with proper attribution) in training
materials.
* The Koha manual is licensed under the GPL, and a CC-BY-NC-SA license
is not compatible, making it questionable whether content from the
wiki can be incorporated into the manual.
* Many edits on the wiki were made by people acting as an employee of
a Koha support vendor or a paid consultant.
* It is not clear that there was a conscious decision by the Koha
project to use CC-BY-NC-SA - it may well be the case that this license
was chosen by default or by accident when the wiki was migrated to
DokuWiki.

Consequently, I propose that we relicense the wiki under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).  As with the current
license, this means that wiki content can be reused, but only with
proper attribution and the requirement that derivative works be
available under a compatible license.

Relicensing would require the consent of those who have made
significant edits to the wiki.  I propose that we follow a process
similar to Wikipedia's proposed relicensing
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update):

[1] The electorate will be the set of people meeting all of the
following criteria:

* have a registered account on wiki.koha.org
* have created at least one page or made at least 5 edits by the end
of the day on 5 May 2009 according to the wiki server's clock.
* have a valid email address

I will put together a list of people meeting those criteria by the end
of the week and send them each of them an email to the address
registered on the wiki.  Anybody whose email bounces will not be
considered part of the electorate unless they contact me.

[2] The election will run next week during the 72 hours spanning 13
May to 15 May in the US Eastern time zone.  The ballot will have three
options:

* Yes, I am in favor of this change
* No, I am opposed to this change
* I do not have an opinion on this change

If more than 50% of the people who cast a vote either accept or reject
the change, the vote will carry.  If no majority is obtained, or if
the majority of voters express no opinion, we'll go back to the
drawing board and discuss this.  I will use one of the DokuWiki voting
plugins to run the vote.

Comments on the substance of the proposal or the proposed voting
procedure are welcome.

Regards,

Galen
-- 
Galen Charlton
VP, Research & Development, LibLime
galen.charlton at liblime.com
p: 1-888-564-2457 x709
skype: gmcharlt