User:Tim Starling (WMF)

Full-time MediaWiki developer and Wikimedia system administrator. See Wikipedia:User:Tim Starling.

Source code license

All source code which I have made publicly available, and for which I hold the copyright, may be distributed under any of the open source licenses approved as such by the Open Source Initiative, at the option of the licensee. A list of such licenses can be found here.

If the license places requirements on the form of the work, such as requiring a standard file header, then it is the responsibility of the distributor to alter the work to bring it into compliance, before the work can be distributed under that license.

Any statement of limited liability or warranty in these licenses should be interpreted as being to the extent permitted by applicable law. I recognise that a statutory warranty may apply to certain parties with whom I have a professional relationship, and that to misrepresent the rights of these clients by denying this warranty may constitute a breach of the Trade Practices Act of Australia or corresponding state-level legislation.

Works with multiple authors, where I am one of the authors, may be distributed under any OSI-approved license that has the support of all of the copyright holders. I encourage the authors of derived works to dual-license under the GNU General Public License (version unspecified), and at least one license that is less restrictive.

In principle, I am committed to seeing my work in this arena distributed without any restriction, but I recognise the legal problems with the concept of irrevocable public domain dedication. Please accept my personal, non-binding assurance that I do not intend to seek redress for any breach of the copyright of these works.

Frequently asked question

Q. You didn't put a license on an extension you wrote, and then some loser tagged it GNU Affero GPL, and then someone else contributed a few lines of code on top of that. Can I now retag it MIT on the assumption that the other contributor read and agreed to your user page?: A. That's rather the flaw in the whole plan isn't it? No, other contributors are not bound by the license statement above, and so the extension becomes GNU Affero GPL unless you obtain the other contributor's consent for a relicense, or revert their contributions. This is why I explicitly specify permissive licenses on new projects these days.