Proposed wiki license

SDL Development
12

After what Sam said about it being public domain, I put up the following
license text at http://www.libsdl.org/cgi/docwiki.cgi/WikiLicense> By posting to the http://libsdl.org wiki you are placing your posting

in the public domain. That is, you are giving everyone the right to do
what they will with your posting.

You agree to take full responsibility for your postings. By posting
here you are certifying that you have the legal right to post what
your are posting, and, that you take full legal responsibility for
what you write.

Posting of spam, unauthorized advertising, hate speech, pornography,
obscenity, copyright materials for which you do not own the copyright,
stolen property, any material that is illegal, or anything not related
to SDL may result in immediate loss of posting privileges.

On Mon, 2004-08-23 at 15:55, Glenn Maynard wrote:

On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 08:30:24PM +0200, Stephane Marchesin wrote:

GFDL will probably cause trouble with debian.

I tend to like the creative commons license, not because they’re good
(there’s no “better” license), but because they try to be user-friendly
about their implications (with the human-readable code) :
http://creativecommons.org/license/

Their licenses tend to be very complicated. The “do whatever you want”
license (“Attribution 2.0”) is some seven pages long in my browser,
compared to the half-page MIT license. It’s complicated enough that
Debian doesn’t seem to have a consensus opinion on it yet; there’s a
lot of “this is odd, we’re not really sure”, which makes me wary of
the license. (I don’t put any stock in the CC’s “common deed” nonsense.
If you want to understand the permissions a license gives you, you must
read the license.)

Anyway, I’d recommend again to back up a bit: stop picking licenses and
talk about what basic terms you’re looking for, what you want to do–and
to allow others to do–with the text, and why. What are your goals?

For example, my answer for my work is usually “let anyone use it for any
purpose; I don’t want to deal with legal stuff if I can avoid it, and I
don’t want it to get in my way or anyone else’s down the road”. (As a
result, I favor the MIT license.)

This won’t give you a license right away, but I think figuring out what
you want in a license will move in the right direction better than pasting
licenses, since that’s doing the same thing–“are these terms what we
want?”–but with the added hassle of having to interpret legalese in the
way, and for those of us offering commentary, it’s impossible to tell
what parts you actually want, and which are just parts of the stock
license you’re using that you don’t actually care about.
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