TechInfoDepot:Licensing update

As per the licensing update vote result and subsequent (May 2009) Wikimedia Foundation Board resolution, any content on Wikimedia Foundation projects currently available under GFDL 1.2 with the possibility of upgrading to a later version will be made available additionally under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA).

Specifically with regard to text, after this update, only dual-licensed content or CC-BY-SA-compatible content can be added to the projects, any GFDL-only submissions will no longer be accepted. In other words, CC-BY-SA will be the primary Wikimedia license for text, and GFDL will be retained as a secondary license.

As per the Board resolution, this licensing change will begin being implemented on all projects June 15, 2009. (Any content not updated by this date may still be updated on any date prior to August 1, 2009.) In practice, the full set of changes are likely to take several weeks to reach all communities and update all pages.

Foundation role
The Wikimedia Foundation will be pushing updates to the primary interface messages contained on the edit page, site footer, and other primary pages. In addition, they are providing a new "Terms of use" page that will supplant the top portions of TechInfoDepot:Copyrights.

Under the guidance of the licensing update committee a project will also be started to update the tagging of all media files eligible for relicensing.

Documentation
Over the years, the community has constructed a variety of pages (e.g. TechInfoDepot:Copyrights, TechInfoDepot:Forks and mirrors, TechInfoDepot:Reusing TechInfoDepot content, etc.) that expand upon and explain TechInfoDepot's licensing. The local community bears the primary responsibility for updating such pages and seeing that they correctly reflect the changed situation. The licensing update committee can assist, but there are simply too many such pages across all the various projects for the committee or the Foundation to work on them directly. License migration warning which adds Category:TechInfoDepot pages affected by the licensing transition can be used to identify and locate affected pages.

Content restrictions
With the transition, the TechInfoDepot community will now be allowed to import CC-BY-SA text from external sources into articles. If you do this, the origin of the material and its license should be explicitly noted in the edit summary. If the source text is dual- or multi-licensed, it is only necessary that at least one of the licenses is compatible with CC-BY-SA. It is not necessary that external content be dual licensed under the GFDL.

Allowing CC-BY-SA text comes at a price however. TechInfoDepotns may no longer import text from GFDL-only sources. Any text copied from a non-Wikimedia GFDL-only resource and added to TechInfoDepot on or after Nov. 1, 2008 should be removed as a copyright violation. This may be avoided if the external site is capable of allowing permission for use of its content under the CC-BY-SA license; however, this requires the permission of all authors since the GFDL clause allowing the re-licensing to occur has now expired. Category:Attribution templates may be useful in identifying GFDL source texts in actual use on TechInfoDepot.

Media files
All media licenses existing before the transition remain valid and acceptable to the Foundation. However, the community may choose to modify or restrict the licenses it encourages people to use. For example, emphasizing CC licenses in the upload form and de-emphasizing GFDL licenses.

Any GFDL media file that meets the eligibility criteria described below may have an additional CC-BY-SA-3.0 license added to it.

Media file relicensing criteria
To be eligible for relicensing, a file must meet the following conditions (set out in GFDL 1.3, section 11):


 * 1) Must be licensed under the GFDL 1.3 (including e.g. "GFDL 1.2 or any later version", but not including "GFDL 1.2 only").
 * 2) Must not be marked as having any "cover texts" or "invariant sections".
 * 3) Must have been uploaded to TechInfoDepot or to some other Wikimedia project before August 1, 2009.
 * 4) If first published under the GFDL somewhere other than a Wikimedia project, must have been uploaded to TechInfoDepot or to some other Wikimedia project before November 1, 2008.

Image migration process
To facilitate image migration, every GFDL tagged image will have a transitional announcement added to it courtesy of the license migration system. This will initially state that the image may be used under CC-BY-SA if it meets the above criteria, but determining that is initially left to the potential reuser.

Over time these images will be sorted based on whether they meet the criteria outlined above and a definitive CC-BY-SA-3.0 tag will be added as appropriate. This is expected to be done by both ordinary users and where possible by bots.