bingle-admin wrote:

Prioritization and scheduling of this bug is tracked on Mingle card https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/analytics/cards/1346

We voted and Kevin should handle this.

WTFPL is not an appropriate license, it's not OSI approved and suffers from the s ame problems as "public domain" in that it doesn't work in all countries. The Wikimedia default license is GPL v2 or later. If the authors want a permissive license, please use Apache v2 (with patent protection) or MIT.

In talking this over, I noticed that a lot of repositories, such as the prominent puppet repository, do not have a LICENSE file. It seems to me from some quick research like that means that the code is *NOT* open source, that all rights are withheld by the author. Is there something that overrides that for organizations, like on Github does the wikimedia organization have a default license that applies to all its repositories unless otherwise specified? In that case, it seems that we should not add a LICENSE file to any repository unless we wanted a different license (which in this case we don't). Otherwise, it seems to me we need to add LICENSE files to a *lot* of repositories.

I don't understand the legalities of this, and we have a question in to our legal team.

Yes and no. Anyone who works for the Wikimedia Foundation has a clause in their contract which states all of their code will be licensed under an OSI-approved license, defaulting to GPL v2 or later. So if code was written by a WMF staff member we can assume their contributions licensed as GPL v2 or later. If there are non-staff members who have contributed to the repository, we'll need to reach out to them and get an explicit statement regarding licensing (or if it worst case absolutely comes to it, remove/rewrite their code). Doing so might take time, but those of us in the Software-Licensing project are more than willing to help out, and have gone through this process before with other repositories.

Regarding operations/puppet, that is slow but ongoing (see T67270). If you find other repositories that also don't have any licensing information and don't yet have a task filed, please file one in the Software-Licensing project :)

Thanks very much for the explanation, @Legoktm

Change 398412 had a related patch set uploaded (by Milimetric; owner: Milimetric):
[analytics/wikimetrics@master] Add MIT license

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/398412

Change 398412 merged by Milimetric:
[analytics/wikimetrics@master] Add MIT license

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/398412