OSS Licenses for the wiki content #869
Conversation
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Thank you for the PR. Sadly it's not possible to retroactively apply a license, as it would require sign-off by all contributors (214 and counting).
This is true under a narrow understanding of modern copyright law. If you feel that it's not within your best interests to make use of the wiki, then don't. But I can assure you (NAL) that you're not going to get into legal trouble for using the wiki as a reference. The main issue with lack of license on source code is forking. e.g., somebody dies or moves on, and you want to maintain the project. Or they're an asshole and you want to fork it. The wiki doesn't really benefit from forking, per-se. We're very open to taking on more contributors to help maintain it. The most we could possibly do would be to add a license that is retroactive onwards from the date of the license addition. That makes it pretty muddy though, as most pages will eventually contain a mix of licensed and unlicensed content. I wish I had a better resolution for you, I'm sorry. |
This pull request will require discussion with the people that have contributed to the wiki in the past, the present, and people who may contribute to the wiki in the future.
This pull request adds licenses to the prose (writing and guides) and code samples (often used to demonstrate concepts).
For guides and prose, the LICENSE file applies. It uses the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and allows redistribution and adapting, with attribution to the original source. It also prevents users from adding legal terms or technological measures that prevent legally prevent people from doing anything the original license permits. There is also no liabilities or warranties, protecting the wiki's contributors legally. This license allows users of the wiki to provide screenshots and snippets of the guides, with attribution. At the current time with prose and code samples, that is not legally allowed, as there is no license, and the content is under exclusive copyright, restricting what the wiki content can be used for.
It is also risky legally to use any of the content on the wiki, as there is no explicit copyright/code owners and if one of the OSS contributors, past or present decides to sue people for copyright infringement due to using content like code samples from the wiki, they are not protected legally as no license means that the person contributing the code most likely owns the exclusive copyright to that content.
For code samples, attribution is not required as the MIT License applies. This is stored in the LICENSE-CODE file. Discussion should happen on who the copyright owners should be for the open source content, whether a different license should be used or if
Bedrock Wiki contributorsaccurately describes the content owners of the content on the wiki. The MIT license allows for commercial use, distribution, modification and private use. There is also no liability or warranty, keeping the contributors legally protected.This is a draft pull request for now to allow for discussion.