Wiki copyrights and licenses

Jonas Larsson

Before we launch the Wiki publicly we need to decide how to handle copyrights and licenses. I can think of several alternatives and I would appreciate your feedback on this. Here comes my thoughts:

What is clear is that by adding material to the Wiki each author must grant CFD Online a perpetual license to use this material in the Wiki. Allowing people to withdraw material from the Wiki would create a lot of trouble to separate things later on.

Since the Wiki is a free resource created by volunteers without any payment I would prefer to have a fairly free copyright policy. Or what do you think? Would you like to limit use and redistribution of the Wiki material? There are a few alternative "free-distribution" licenses:

We could have a copyright similar to the GNU GPL license for software. This would allow anyone to use and modify the content as long as they give credit to its origin and also release their derived works under the same license. Gnu calls this license the Gnu FDL (Free Document License). This license was originally written mainly for manuals, but it has been used in many Wikis also.

An alternative license, which has become popular lately, is the creative commons license, which exists in a few different flavours, all of which allow free distribution but depending on which flavour of the license you use it can also require one or several of:

* Attribution to original author/source * Noncommercial reuse (disallowing others to use the material commecially) * No derivate works (prohibiting others to make derivate works) * Share alike (requiring derivative works to be under the same license)

Here are a few links with more information about these various licensing options:

http://creativecommons.org/ http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/fdl.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

What is your opinion about the most suitable license to use for material in the Wiki?

Would you like to allow others to take material from the wiki, change and modify it and then redistrubute it?

Would you like to allow others to take material from the wiki and use it commercialy (like selling it etc.)?

With the progress we have made with the wiki over the last few weeks I think that it is time to start discussing this license issue a bit. It might seem boring but it can be very important. If you don't belive mee you can read what happened to Eric's Tresure Troves (now called mathworld) a few years ago: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/about/e...ommentary.html