Wikimedia CH/Libre Software Release Guidelines

NOTE: This is a work in progress. It is NOT an official document. This is an early stub. Thank you for any early contribution before public consultation.

Wikimedia CH supports cultural institutions, media and Internet websites in releasing software and applications etc. under Libre licenses (also known as Free Licenses, or Open Licenses), in a successful way.

We support people with Good Intentions

Any Libre License is a tool designed to explicitly enable collaboration to people with Good Intentions.

In fact, by default, a software (as most of the other creative digital creations) cannot be adoptes, studied, not even examined by external security experts. This is caused by the default copyright rule that is: "all rights reserved".

Instead, if you release your software with a Libre License, contributors have legal explicit authorization to adopt and adapt that software, without risking a sue for copyright violation from you.

About people with Bad Intentions

Some people want to add additional restrictions to prevent "bad usages" or prevent "Bad Intentions". But note: people who already do not obey the law, will not obey any license. So, restrictions often simply prevent uses by people with Good Intentions.

For example, please don't impose an "non commercial" permissions on a software, since lot of experienced people with good legitimate commercial purposes may want to adopt a software, and you can get lot of benefits from that in term of software quality improvements.

Think about the success of the Linux kernel or the Wikipedia software, that are available to everybody, from schools to governments to small to big companies, also for commercial ones.

So, how to prevent "bad" adoptions?

A Libre license with a Copyleft condition can help in releasing a software, and allow people to adopt it, only if they have intentions to contribute back to the community, creating a positive circle in which the more experienced people are interested in the software, the more somebody else invest in the software, the more the software is improved (just like the Linux kernel).

Libre Licenses

The recommended Libre licenses to be applied to a software produced by an institution are:

• GNU General Public License v3+ (GNU GPL v3+)

  Recommended for software that end users use where you want it to remain libre.

  Success stories: Linux kernel, WordPress, Joomla!, MediaWiki...

• GNU Affero General Public License v3+ (GNU AGPL v3+)

  Recommended for software that is going to be installed on a server and that you want to remain libre.

  Success stories: Nextcloud, Grafana, CiviCRM, ...

• https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

  All licenses listed on this page as "free software licenses" are accepted.

• https://opensource.org/licenses

  All licenses listed on this page as approved by the Open Source Initiative are also accepted.

Note: you can decide the license of a work only if you are the copyright holder of that work.

If your work is based—or derived from—something else, be sure that you respects that license, and that your license is compatible with that.

Technical details

Once the software license is chosen, the developers should highlight that fact directly from the software repository. For example, creating a file LICENSE and mentioning it also in the main project description, for example in the README file.

Usually, big projects mention the license also at the top of each file. You can evaluate it, if you want to have a super-clear definition.

In the project description, mention the individual contributors, also because they usually are the copyright holders.

Practical example for a "README.md" file:

== License ==

(C) PROJECT_NAME 2021, 2022 Name Surname, Name Surname, and other contributors

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Thank you for your contributions to this project! Code contributors are welcome to put their name in the copyright header of their edited file.

In this way collaboration is enabled and explicitly authorized.

Feel free to communicate this software change to Wikimedia CH, in order to allow nice social communication.

See also

• Wikimedia CH/Software Development Guidelines