On Saturday 02 March 2013 10:26:14 anatoly techtonik wrote:

The license clause is attached to MoinMoin wiki software, the code pieces is a content and are not affected. GPL clause can be removed. It is not needed (as the /moin/ prefix in the URL).

Although the remark about the GPL applying to the MoinMoin software is correct, and thus the content is not GPL-licensed, this doesn't mean that the content is actually licensed in any explicit way whatsoever. In other words, "removing" the GPL (or actually not applying it to the content in the first place) doesn't give anyone any right to do anything with the content other than to use it on the Python Wiki itself. This is an unfortunate situation that was never resolved because I seem to remember some people regarding the unclear licensing as somehow being beneficial - the only benefit I can think of is that people perhaps don't spam the Internet with advertising-laden clones of the Python Wiki, but maybe these exist anyway - and so any content submitted to the Wiki is taking a one-way trip there. One could track down the authors of any pages to get their permission for further redistribution and use of their contributions, but no attempt has been made to do this in general. Paul

On Saturday 02 March 2013 17:08:23 anatoly techtonik wrote:

I think it is fair to put non-HomePage wiki content to CC0 / Public Domain unless specified otherwise. If you want to preserve your rights - go publish the content in your blog and supply a link. Tracking down authors is a useless activity - nobody will do this, so I'd not make things more complicated for contributors and users. Wiki is for sharing, not for placing restrictions on each other.

I agree that if you're contributing stuff to some site where the obvious intention is to share things with others, you probably shouldn't expect to restrict how that content is used, especially if those contributions involve editing other people's work, but the lack of any explicit licensing terms means that we can't just apply CC0 to what we already have. I don't think that it would be too difficult to get people to agree to relicensing, but I was just saying that nobody seemed to think it was worth doing in the first place. Personally, I do think it is worth it if we are to regard the content as useful or valuable, and if Justin wants to use the decorators content in some other context, I encourage him to at least consider that approach for that page before giving up. Paul

On Monday 04 March 2013 18:41:50 Justin Rosen wrote:

Thanks for the reply guys, I'll pass this on to the powers that be, but it sounds like this is prob a dead end.

Are we able to track down the original authors? Is it worth sending a mass email out to those who've edited this wiki page to get an OK for a fully free license? I agree, why post code to the world if you don't want anyone to use it.

I think we all agree informally about the aspect of sharing, but we obviously have to assume that someone perhaps only contributed to the Wiki because they only wanted their edits to live there and never be used in any other context. This is why Wiki deployments often feature licensing statements when people edit pages, so that people know what they're agreeing to. The daunting task of tracking down contributors would probably start with the info page for the page in question: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonDecorators?action=info Some of those edits will be effectively "null" because they will have been reverted. This leaves us with around 30 or so contributors, some of whom may be difficult to reach because they may not have much to do with Python any more and may decide to ignore any correspondence. I personally think that a prominent campaign to relicense the content would probably take a lot of the effort out of chasing up contributors, but it wouldn't eliminate the problem, and it obviously doesn't help you in your current situation, unfortunately. Paul