LiteratePrograms:Copyrights
From LiteratePrograms
The following material is roughly based on the Wikimedia Foundation's Meta:Copyrights page.
All contributions to LiteratePrograms wiki are the property of the submitter unless otherwise noted, but are released under the MIT/X11 License which permits any kind of use and requires only that the below license be reproduced. In particular, there is no requirement for attribution, no restriction on commercial use, and no requirement to release derivative works under a similar license, unlike the GNU Public License. The authors of a particular page can be viewed by clicking the "History" tab at the top of that page.
All content except for the exceptions listed in the below section is considered to be released under the following terms:
- Copyright © 2008 the authors listed in the page history
- Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
- The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
- THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
This is a license known variously as the MIT License or X11 License and is acknowledged by the Open Source Initiative (see OSI: MIT License). By clicking "Save page" you are indicating you grant any and all persons and organizations a license to use your work under terms of the above bolded text. If you do not agree with these terms, then do not submit your work to this website.
If you're familiar with the BSD license, the MIT license is effectively very similar except that it does not include the prohibition against using the contributor's name for advertising without permission. The MIT license is more explicit about the rights of the person reusing the code, while BSD is more explicit about including the copyright notice with both source and binary distributions.
When you download source code, the software will automatically add a copyright notice to each file that it knows the comment format for. This notice includes the full text of the MIT/X11 license, as well as the URL of the page history and a permalink to the downloaded version. You may wish to also add this notice to files that the software can't handle.
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Compatibility
If you wish to add existing source code or a derivative of existing code to LiteratePrograms, you must ensure it is released under a license compatible with the MIT/X11 license. Because MIT is so liberal, there are extremely few such licenses; the only popular ones are MIT itself, free use (release all rights), and public domain. The main difference with the latter two is that they do not require any copyright notice to be attached to the software, and do not provide any disclaimer of warranty or liability. The copyright notice will still be added to these files by the software, but will have no effect.
Note in particular that the following licenses are not compatible with our license:
- GPL, LGPL, or GFDL (including Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Wikibooks content)
- BSD (modified or original)
- Any Creative Commons license (they all require attribution)
- Apache, Mozilla, PHP, Artistic (Perl), Python, Sleepycat, or zlib
If your contribution contains code under any of these licenses, it will be deleted unless you are the copyright owner or can persuade the copyright owner to re-release it under MIT or public domain. Sometimes individual contributors to a project will release (or multilicense) their own work under a more liberal license; if you can demonstrate that the material you obtained was written solely by such a person or persons via a change history, it is admissable.
You might ask why I chose such a liberal license for LiteratePrograms if it imposes such great limitations on contribution sources. One reason is that attribution becomes very difficult in the face of a wiki, where many people work on a single piece of code. Another is that it can be very difficult to track down and contact all of the users who modified a piece of code on a wiki, so any provision requiring the permission of these users is impractical. The more philosophical reason is that I want this to be as valuable a resource for the working programmer as it is for the open-source developer and student; in some companies, it's against policy for developers to even view copyleft code. I also believe it will not significantly impede growth as long as most of our content is written directly by contributors, and most of these contributors do not object to these liberal terms.
Images and files
All images and other files uploaded to LiteratePrograms are released under the following even more liberal public domain/free use license:
I am either the original creator of this work or have obtained permission from the original creator to release it under the following terms. I irrevocably grant this work into the public domain, permitting it to be used by anyone for any purpose. In case this is not legally possible, I also release all rights to the work granted by copyright law, allowing anyone to copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, and sell this file, and create derivative works under any terms. Moreover, I affirm that to the best of my knowledge, this work is not derived from any copyrighted work not released under these same terms.
Note that this license applies only to this specific file, not necessarily derivative works, visually similar works in other formats, or higher resolution versions of the same image.
We choose to use this license for images because we want to be able to redistribute accompanying images with our textual content, and applying MIT to images can be cumbersome, since it requires a textual copyright notice to accompany the image when it is reused, even in contexts without the capability for text.
Exceptions
Certain content on this site relating to the interface and project management is derived from work released under a copyleft license, and so cannot be legally released under the MIT/X11 license. These exceptions are as follows:
- Interface elements written by or derived from those written by the MediaWiki software developers are released under the GPL.
- This page is released under the GFDL, as it is based on a Wikimedia Foundation page released under the GFDL.
No other content is excepted, with the possible exception of short quotations as permitted by fair use laws. Any text inserted to the contrary is invalid and void.
Copyright infringements
If you are the owner of copyrighted or copyleft content that is being used on LiteratePrograms without your permission, then please contact our Designated agent to have it permanently removed. We will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership.
