Open Source Content License (OSCL) - Other/Miscellaneous licenses

[Wilson, Andrew]

OSCL Steward [mailto:oscl at rcbitsolutions.com] wrote:

> I also have thought about it in the context of who would want
> to start a collaborative project on our website if we make them put it
under
> our license or any specific license.  Perhaps the best method of
dealing
> with this would be to modify the mediawiki software we are using to
allow
> the original author of a page to determine it's license from a list of
say
> OSI approved licenses.

Still not clear to me from context whether you are concerned about
(a) choice of license for content on your website, (b) choice of license
for your mediawiki software, or (c) both.

For content hosted on your website, if you want to promote maximum
reuse, the
obvious choice of licenses would be the GNU Free Documentation License
and/or the Creative Commons share-alike family of licenses.  Specify
these licenses in your contributor's agreement.

For your mediawiki software, since you seem to want a reciprocal license
which requires derivatives to be shared, there are several pre-existing
choices.  GPL -- perhaps its Affero variant since
you are specifically concerned with web software -- LGPL, OSL, or
the CPL/EPL/CDDL family are obvious reciprocal licensing options.

As you've already seen, this list is generally quite averse to approving
new
licenses unless they are substantive improvements over existing
licenses.

Andy Wilson
Intel open source technology center