Wiki Relicensed to CC-BY-SA 3.0

[Daniel Holbach]

Hello,

can you please get this text out on ubuntu-news.org?

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For around six years the Ubuntu Wiki (wiki.ubuntu.com) has lived without
a clarified license. The Documentation team fixed a similar issue on
their wiki (help.ubuntu.com) three years ago. They chose a Creative
Commons license, which made it much easier to redistribute content and
give contributors clarified rights regarding their contributions.

After a longer discussion, the Community Council agreed to use a similar
decision process and the same license. Six weeks ago (15.02.2011), the
Community Council reached out to every single Ubuntu Wiki contributor
and asked for feedback. Also did we publish the same text in a couple of
Ubuntu-related blogs and discussed the relicensing in a Community
Council meeting.

Here is the feedback we received in the last six weeks:

 - Huge number of +1.
 - Disagreement with the process. A handful of contributors were
   unhappy about that we didn't ask for explicit approval of every
   single contributor to the wiki. While that makes sense in theory,
   it's simply not feasible with 15000+ contributors. We feel we did
   our best in reaching out to everybody and asking for feedback. Also
   did all of these contributors have no objections against the license
   itself.
 - Question about "DRM clause" in CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. One contributor
   wondered if we could dual-license the wiki to avoid the "DRM clause"
   in the Creative Commons license. Although we are sympathetic to this
   request, doing so would mean maintaining the wiki under two licenses
   and would mean that we could not incorporate BY-SA licensed
   materials, like material from Wikimedia projects. We have opted for
   the simpler strategy of using a single license.

Without further ado, we'd like to thank every single contributor to the
Ubuntu Wiki for their work and congratulate everyone to having more
rights regarding their Wiki content now:

	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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Thanks a lot in advance, have a great day,
 Daniel

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