Proposal:Content re-license

This page is a proposal approved by the committee.  The proposal was moved by John Vandenberg and seconded by privatemusings and Pru Mitchell. If you are not a member of the organisation, you may request an account on this wiki using special:RequestAccount, and discuss this proposal on the discussion page.

This proposal is to change the website license from GFDL to the other Share-alike licence CC-BY-SA as decided in July 2009 (Resolution:Updating official-wiki license), and add a provision for all content to be relicensed again when required.

Background

The GFDL was the license used on most Wiki installations. It was probably the default at the time we set up the website.

At the bottom of every page of the website is:

Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2.

Since then most/all Wikimedia Foundation projects have migrated to CC licences by way of the GFDL license upgrade loophole explicitly added by the Free Software Foundation in order to help WMF projects migrate away from the GFDL.

That loophole expired on August 1, 2009. In order to change licence, we need each participant to relicense their contributions.

If we are going to switch license, we should do it now while the number of participants on the wiki is quite small and they are all known to the committee. Some are no longer financial members.

Policy

All content in content namespaces on websites controlled by the Wikimedia Australia, Inc. must be either public domain in Australia, licensed under CC-BY-SA, or explicitly approved by the committee and its copyright status clearly recorded on each page where it appears.

Any media on Wikimedia Commons may be used via mw:InstantCommons, except where it is still covered by copyright in Australia or other Australia laws restrict publication.

Existing content

The committee will ask all existing participants on the official wiki to agree to relicense their contributions from GFDL to CC-BY-SA.

Process for any remaining GFDL content

Content which can not be relicensed, with the permission of everyone involved, will be either

  • tagged with {{GFDL}} by approval of the committee, or
  • deleted.

See /remaining GFDL content for a list of pages that the committee may tag as GFDL.

Future relicensing

In order to prepare any future relicensing needs, all accounts will be required to grant Wikimedia Australia, Inc. with the right to relicense their content to another license which meets the Freedomdefined.org criteria or its successor or nearest equivalent (such as the debian definition of 'free').

Implementation

Signatures will be gathered at Wikimedia Australia:Relicensing agreement

The website terms and conditions will require new accounts to state that they agree for the organisation to relicense their content.

All references to the GFDL will be changed to CC-BY-SA.

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