Veyrdite wrote:Our wiki has been licensed under Creative Commons BY NC SA for a long time (forever?). Getting rid of the 'NC' term has some benefits and some of us want to do this.
I'm not sure that I agree, but tbh I don't think I ever realized that the wiki ever even was 'NC'.
What are the benefits and why would you (and others) like to make the change? I'm all ears; if you'll forgive me, it's been a while since I've even considered the difference in those licenses, and I'm not sure why the project would be better off without NC than with. I guess one thing that comes to mind is scammers who burn FOSS software on CDs and sell it at a price, which is kinda sketchy license-wise and also kinda unfair. I don't know if there's a legal precedent as to if that's OK or not. (Maybe on http://gpl-violations.org/ w.r.t. the GPL? Don't know.)
Then, of course, there's whether anyone actually cares; scammers gonna scam anyway, and if removing -NC makes people happier and more likely to contribute, then sure, I'm in. Thoughts?
Veyrdite wrote:People who have contributed to the wiki have done it under the current/old license. I don't like the idea of changing the whole wiki to a new license without people's consent ("if we don't respect other people's licenses, how do we expect them to respect ours").
I guess here's where things get sketchy, and this is something I've never really read about, so I have no idea the laws. Generally, as I understand in the US, suppose you work for a company developing a piece of software: that company owns copyright on whatever you do unless they explicitly disclaim interest in copyright on the work that you produce. For this reason, the SQLite project (and possibly others) require that contributors disclaim copyright explicitly with any code contributions, and they even go so far as to require employers to send a form letter, signed by a "company officer," before they'll accept patches. (I guess that's to avoid the possible scenario of an employee slapping the "disclaimer of copyright" statement on their contributions while submitting patches written on company time, thinking that that's somehow OK).
What we've got here is obviously not an employee-employer relationship between contributors and the project, so I don't know if copyright automagically goes to Unvanquished Development or not. (Anyone know the answer to this? And I mean really know, not just idle speculation.)
Veyrdite wrote:It will be impossible to find and contact every person that's ever contributed to the wiki, so no matter what there will be a little hope and love involved in a changeover.
This and the problem that I mentioned above (i.e., just who exactly owns copyright) is the real legal issue. Basically, as I understand it, if each contributor owns copyright for each specific change made, the license could theoretically be changed and any changes made by contributors who don't agree or can't be reached could just be culled. This exact issue was actually had by the Darkplaces engine lead devs, who wanted to buy a license from id for the Quake 1 source (I presume), then get all of the code contributors to agree to closing the source, just so that they could make a closed-source commercial version of Nexuiz (which is what prompted the whole Nexuiz -> Xonotic change). The TL;DR (as I recall) was that they couldn't get in touch with all of the contributors and not all of them agreed, so they gave up and bought a license for CryEngine.
Otherwise, if Unvanquished Development has some sort of legal entity behind it (did that ever happen? lol I don't remember.) and the copyright belongs to that, then I guess whoever represents Unvanquished Development can make that change.
Anyway, sorry for the long post (as always) and tl;dr, if everybody else wants it, I'll gladly agree to the switch, just thought I'd share what (little) I know about some of the legal issues.