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How is the wiki licensed?

Posted: Tue Aug 11, 2015 4:04 pm
by tepples
In another topic, we are considering writing a new NES and 6502 programming tutorial, and I'm trying to figure where it shall be hosted. I want to make sure that the text of the tutorial can be lawfully reused elsewhere.

So what is the default license for contributions to the wiki? Somehow I don't remember that ever being specified in the six years since it was last asked.

Re: How is the wiki licensed?

Posted: Tue Aug 11, 2015 4:17 pm
by lidnariq
As far as I'm concerned, my contributions are approximately WTFPL/CC0. MIT/CC-BY would be nice, but I don't require it.

Re: How is the wiki licensed?

Posted: Tue Aug 11, 2015 10:11 pm
by thefox
IANAL, but since the default license of the wiki hasn't been (?) explicitly specified, I believe that each contributor holds rights to their respective contributions. Since the wiki doesn't force contributions under any specific license, I don't really see a problem with you specifying whatever license you'd like to use on your tutorial page.

Re: How is the wiki licensed?

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 1:29 am
by rainwarrior
Under usual licensing for these kinds of things, contributors always retain the full right to use their contributions elsewhere. i.e. if the wiki license happened to forbid commercial use of its material, this restriction doesn't actually apply to the contributor. I don't think our license should forbid this, I'm just using that as an example.

I'm personally I'm in favour of some kind of very permissive license. I think there's more value in allowing code samples from the wiki be used freely and commercially than not (e.g. the idea of selling something may motivate somebody to make stuff). I don't care about attribution or modification notices for anything I added to the wiki, I just want the knowledge to be freely available.

No license at all is a liability. In particular it would help if someone were to try to claim ownership of their contributions and demand they be removed. (I think it's unlikely to happen, but it's a case that a license would protect against.) If the license explicitly puts contributions into a permissive license, they wouldn't have grounds to do this, so far as I know.

Assigning a license now, retroactively, of course is a breach of existing contributor's rights, but I would expect that all current contributors would be willing to comply. I don't know what good legal practice is for this kind of action (put up a notice somewhere for a period of time for past contributors to object?). Practically speaking, if you change it right now, you limit the group of people that could take issue with it to only the people who have contributed to it so far, so at least it's a relatively small group.

Re: How is the wiki licensed?

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 2:26 am
by thefox
Since the wiki requires registration, and thus a valid email address, we could try contacting all of the contributors about assigning a license to the material. I wouldn't expect to get many objections. I'd also expect most of the major contributors to be reachable via email or here in the forums.

I do agree that assigning a license would be a good idea, if it's possible.

Re: How is the wiki licensed?

Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 9:02 am
by tepples
Let's get it started: diff

Re: How is the wiki licensed?

Posted: Thu Aug 13, 2015 6:57 pm
by Myask
tepples wrote: six years since it was last asked.
Hmm...
In [url=http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?p=149039#p149039]this post[/url], I wrote:...huh, I didn't know the NesDev wiki didn't have a big contributor licensing schema to prevent people from taking their ball(edits) and going home...unless the little warning of how things will be "mercilessly edited, etc." on the Edit page is deemed sufficient.
...guess I didn't quite ask.

Licensed.

Re: How is the wiki licensed?

Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2017 6:50 pm
by Myask
This Topic's Action Point Is Still important.