Monthly General Meeting, February 2024
Other Questions
Do we want to pursue relicensing of our guides to CC BY-SA?
Our website content is licensed under the CC BY-SA-NC licence. Occasionally we receive requests to relicense it under a “free content” licence, most often CC BY-SA. This item was added to the agenda following one such request, with particular emphasis on how our current licence prevents creating combined works with Wikipedia content.
As we do not require contributors to grant us rights to their content beyond what the licence grants, up to 73 contributors would need to be contacted to get their permission to redistribute their content under another licence. Content that we cannot relicence (e.g. in cases of contributors not agreeing to the relicence or content being derived from Freenode guides) would need to be rewritten from scratch. This is a significant amount of effort for our organization to undertake, and those present at the meeting were not aware of anyone on staff volunteering to lead the effort.
Furthermore, the benefits of undertaking this effort were disputed. One opinion is that the noncommercial clause (the “NC” in “BY-SA-NC”) in our case is a benefit, as it provides a recourse if someone mirrors our website for profit. There were questions about whether the requester was representing Wikipedia in any official capacity; it was determined that they were not. It was also not clear that our site content would be of particular relevance to Wikipedia as anything other than a source.
The meeting decided to allow our website content to remain under its current licence and explicitly refuse the request.