RE: PepperfishProfiler

["Virgil Smith" <Virgil@...>]

> Remember that any anonymous person can go to the page and change your
> copyright assertion, the license, or the code.  If you really want to
> assert copyright or license on a work, it should be distributed from
> an immutable source, such as one's own web site.

Ah, but an advantage of a Wiki is history tracking.  Of course this still
implies a trust of the site maintainers as they can change things without
adding to the history log, modify the history log itself, etc.

If one is really concerned about the Wiki as a resource and making it
simplified and consistent then the thing to do would be to form a license
policy for the Wiki, state that any posted submission is assumed to be
licensed according to a stated license, and that any posts that violate this
policy (by being covered by some other license) will be removed.  This is
not to say that someone could not reference (i.e. post a link to) code that
is not covered under the license.

If this "stated" license was the one used for Lua (being wary of the fact
that it has changed in the past for different versions of Lua) then this
would go a long way toward making usage of Wiki posted code require no extra
effort to be used in a project (assuming that the project will already
include steps for attributing the Lua copyright).  Unfortunately, to
actually make it a zero sum game one would have to include provisions
stating that any post is released to Tecgraph so that from that point on
they own the copyright and thus a Lua copyright attribution would be
correct.  I have no idea how difficult that would be to arrange, and it may
not even be possible.

My last statement relates back to the fact that many legal types argue that
you cannot release something into the public domain even by stating that you
do so.  The underlying issue to that is that copyright is a right and you
can not sell a right (under many legal systems).  All you can do is
sell/grant a license for use.  The weird legal twist is that you can grant
someone a license to sub/re-license something.