Talk:licensing

I would like to add this to clarify the situation regarding wiki articles:

Licensing/copyright of Wiki articles

As there is no specific license indicated on the wiki, all contributions are assumed to be public domain/freely usable. Of course, the moral rights of the submissions remain with the submitters.

By submitting contributions to the wiki the submitter guarantees that the submission is free to use/public domain (i.e. no third-party copyright restrictions).

Any objections? --BigChimp 10:17, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Added: Additional info: this is displayed on the edit page: "Please note that all contributions to Lazarus wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Lazarus wiki:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!" i.e. free use is more or less described (except for copying), as well as copyright restrictions.

This is a good suggestion. I am considering, however, if adopting a formal license model, like GFDL or a Free Culture license like Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported would be a good idea.--Jwdietrich 12:29, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

It is legally impossible to add a license to/change the license of all existing texts without getting approval from the people who wrote those texts. --Jonas 10:05, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

@Jonas: yes, agreed. (@Jonas: assuming your comment was addressed to me too - if not the below can at least serve as clarification). However, this brings up the question: what is the current license under which the contributors wrote those texts? AFAIK,

• nobody gets an "accept that you license your contributions under license x" type of form when signing up to for a wiki account
• the license info in the footer is empty => so which license is it?
• the only clue is the info in the edit text, which every contributor must have seen

If you think there are problems with changing the licnse, a workaround could be to include a start date in the text.

--BigChimp 12:18, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

The current texts don't have a specific license, so all rights reserved by standard copyright law in their jurisdiction apply, apart indeed from the disclaimer that's displayed when editing (noting that anything you post may be edited, altered or removed by other contributors).

Adding a date after which contributions are licensed under that particular license could indeed be an option.

--Jonas 12:58, 8 July 2013 (UTC)