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/
(via Daniel Holbach)