Wiki Relicensing Ballot

To vote, login and add your username to one of the three options and remove it from the “Yet to vote” list. If you have more than one username, please move your other usernames to the “Duplicate usernames” list. The poll will close some time after 12 October 2009.

The ballot has three options:

• Yes, I am in favor of changing the wiki page license to the GPL version 2 or later terms used by the main Koha download - chris, collum, kmkale, hdl nicomo, kf, russ, tipaul, sushi, gmc, fbcit, oleonard, kylemhall, mjr, pianohacker, joetho, twiggle, thd, fdemians, ricmarques, brendan, nengard, rickw, pabloab, dschust1, moberley, sipri_library, toins, john, heupink, shedges, tajoli, cmurdock, jronallo, ecorrado, federica, irma, paolopoz, dubyk, ata.rehman, timtoo, eric.begin, atz, jbriceiii,Pascale Nalon, pierrick (Pierrick Le Gall), pasik, mdalgity, mao, gmanharris
• No, I am opposed to change -
• I do not have an opinion on this - mdhafen, danny.bouman, vargasr

• Duplicate usernames - chrisc, toins, Stephen Hedges, joshferraro,
  • amoore - I believe the copyright on my edits are property of LibLime. In any case, I hereby re-assign copyright to that entity. Therefore, an officer at LibLime may vote for my edits in this and all future matters.
  • atz - Most but not all of my edits' copyrights are controlled by LibLime. This might be true, in whole or in part, for amoore, rch, kados, gmc, nengard, rickw, and possibly others. However, for the remainder of edits that are solely mine, including this one, I'm for it.
  • Spammers - jack1680, jack1688, jeep1688, bill2100,

• Yet to vote - areinmeyer, askress2009, dhall, engrimran_pk, fdescano, jennyst, kados, lea, mark2200, pathfinder, psm_bu, pustake, rch, rog, saschel, sbrinker, Steve Tonnesen, suyadi, threegee, tnb, ToyKeeper, watsongh
• Yet to vote and email bouncing - aladigital, amanda_katipo.co.nz, daberge, dnmeid, mmacht, nti

Note: in many countries, people hired by a company to enter things on the wiki don't own the copyright, it's the company itself, although this can be changed by their work contract. Owners may move their company's hirees to the “duplicate username” list.

Content on the Koha wiki (http://wiki.koha.org/) is currently available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/). This is a problem for reasons including the following:

• The non-commercial use clause prevents any commercial entity from reusing content from the wiki (with proper attribution) in training materials.
• The Koha manual is licensed under the GPL, and a CC-BY-NC-SA license is not compatible, making it questionable whether content from the wiki can be incorporated into the manual.
• Many edits on the wiki were made by people acting as an employee of a Koha support vendor or a paid consultant.
• It is not clear that there was a conscious decision by the Koha project to use CC-BY-NC-SA - it may well be the case that this license was chosen by default or by accident when the wiki was migrated to DokuWiki.

Consequently, I propose that we relicense the wiki under the GPL. As with the current license, this means that wiki content can be reused, but only with proper attribution and the requirement that derivative works be available under a compatible license.

Relicensing would require the consent of those who have made significant edits to the wiki. I propose that we follow a process similar to Wikipedia's proposed relicensing (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update):

• The electorate is the set of people meeting both of the following criteria:
  • have a registered account on wiki.koha.org
  • have created at least one page or made at least 5 edits by the end of the day on 16 July 2009 according to the wiki server's clock.
• There are up to 85 voters in the elctorate.
• The election will run next week during the 72 hours spanning 9 October to 11 October 2009 in the UTC time zone using the ballot above.
• Two emails will be sent to all voters during the voting period. We cannot guarantee receipt of these emails.

If more than 50% of the people who cast a vote either accept or reject the change, the vote will carry. If no majority is obtained, or if the majority of voters express no opinion, we'll go back to the drawing board and discuss this.

— Galen Charlton 2009/05/06 06:11 — MJ Ray 2009/10/06 15:37