Who owns the content on this wiki?
The original posters. And nobody. And everybody.
jcw, the owner of this site, has written:
My understanding, and intention, for the wiki has always been to make it as freely available as possible (a second goal for me, is to stay out of legal issues). To me, that means that the wiki - which is an original collection of information of more-or-less original contributions - is for all practical purposes in the public domain. I definitely do not "own" it in any sense. At the same time, I do think that those who contribute have an implicit copyright - but by entering their text into the wiki, which is clearly a public resource (and known to be modifiable by anyone), I think one can reasonably argue that they are not placing any restrictions on the further distribution of their information (nor even alteration, for that matter). Not owning it means that whatever I say is no doubt irrelevant - but if it makes your publisher happy: I herewith waive all claims regarding ownership or distribution limitations. Another comforting fact no doubt, is that ActiveState have also included the wiki in full on the Tcl/Tk 2002 Conference CDROM. If someone wants to add a note to the wiki to clarify these issues, or quote me, or whatever, please do - you know how to make it happen :)
Legally, we can presume that copyright vests in whoever contributed to the pages. You own your own words. On the other hand, the contributors have posted here with the intent of sharing their words and their code.
Morally, it's of course reprehensible to copy the material without attribution (assuming, of course, that you can figure out who the contributors are). And it would be even worse to go asserting your own copyright to it. We don't need a repetition of MathWorld's experience [L1 ].
Practically, by posting here, you are giving up your rights unless you explicitly assert them (for example, by including a copyright notice in part of a page.
This means that if you don't like the above conditions, you should feel free to list specific licensing agreement information on software you have created and made available here on the wiki (or anywhere else, for that matter).
Of course, alas, there have been rogue users here. Sometimes they have made feelings run high.
There have been a few incidents in the past where people have felt that editing their pages was abusing them. For well or ill, however, Wiki is a collaborative effort. If you're going to post here, you can expect that material will at least be added. Our community does not generally disagree by deleting [L2 ] nor by distorting [L3 ] but may, for instance, move material from page to page as part of organizing the Wiki for others. Some members also feel free to delete material that appears to be "Wiki squatting" [L4 ]. ''Wiki is not your blog." [L5 ].
There has, apparently, also been an incident where code posted here appeared in someone else's library misattributed. The details are obscure; if the offending code is in the Tcl/Tk core or in Tcllib, the maintainers have extended an invitation to the victim to identify it (publicly or privately). We will make every effort to see that it is removed, that the attribution is corrected, or that other errors are corrected.
Needless to say, anything you find on this site, you use at your own risk. "Anything free comes with no guarantee." (LV: Shoot ... read those shrink wrapped licenses that come with nearly all commercial software - most of the ones I've seen also come with all sorts of disclaimers and attempts to avoid guarantees. )
There was previously a lengthy discussion on this page, which has been moved to Who owns the content of this Wiki - discussion in the interests of clarity and brevity.