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.charl...@liblime.com p: 1-888-564-2457 x709 skype: gmcharlt _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.koha.org http://lists.koha.org/mailman/listinfo/koha-devel
