The copyright discussions led to the following decisions that were agreed upon almost unanimously by those present. First, copyright is not transferred. Someone uploading his data or code, or entering an entry in the wiki retains copyright but gives us a license to use the material.
Data: We decided to give the uploader some flexibility and choose from four variants of the creative commons license. Using the form at http://creativecommons.org/license/ we decided to allow yes/no for commercial use, and yes/share alike for modifications. Not allowing modification does not make sense in our project. It would prevent someone from extending a table for example.
Code: Any code that is shared must be licensed under any of the open source licenses approved at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ . We decided to make GPL the default license for people not wanting to think too much when uploading, and to protect them from uses, such as closed source commercial, that they did not bother to consider.
- Wiki entries are licensed under the creative commons 'yes' for commercial, and 'yes as long as others share alike' for modifications. Commercial use allows us, or anyone, for example, to publish a book based on the wiki. The share alike means that if someone rips us off, that has to be preserved so that someone else can rip them off too!