Fwd: Wikipedia content, GNU Free Documentation License and Apache

[Grant Ingersoll <gs...@apache.org>]

FYI from legal-discuss.  I think I will give it a little more time to  
percolate and then put it up on zones.  Other option is to host  
offsite somewhere, but I would prefer not to do that.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Justin Erenkrantz" <ju...@erenkrantz.com>
> Date: April 25, 2007 12:23:26 AM EDT
> To: "Grant Ingersoll" <gs...@apache.org>
> Cc: legal-discuss@apache.org
> Subject: Re: Wikipedia content, GNU Free Documentation License and  
> Apache
>
> On 4/24/07, Grant Ingersoll <gs...@apache.org> wrote:
>> We on Lucene Java are _considering_ mirroring a specific version of
>> Wikipedia's collection for testing and benchmarking purposes on our
>> zones account for people to download to run specific tests related to
>> search performance and quality.  It is important that we use a
>> specific version so that it is repeatable. WikiMedia doesn't archive
>> for long enough for their links to be reliable, therefore we cannot
>> just grab the latest version from Wikipedia.  See [1] for more
>> details if interested.
>>
>> The content, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
>> Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GFDL, is licensed under the GNU Free
>> Documentation License.  More details can be found at [2].
>>
>> I guess the question is, is this all right?  http://en.wikipedia.org/
>> wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights seems to say this would be OK, but IANAL
>> and all that stuff.  Anyone have experience with how ASF deals with
>> the GFDL in this kind of situation?  I suppose we could look into
>> hosting off site, too, but would rather it be controlled by us.
>
> As long as you do not distribute the Wikipedia database in a Lucene
> release and just have a copy hosted on your Lucene zone or something
> similar so that committers can get at it easily, I don't see a
> particular problem here.  If you make changes to the documentation or
> whatever, you would just need to follow the rules of GFDL
> (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html).
>
> BTW, would you need to commit the database to Subversion?  (I'd
> certainly hope not.)
>
> HTH.  -- justin



---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: java-dev-unsubscribe@lucene.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: java-dev-help@lucene.apache.org