Thread:Project:WikiProject Extensions/Ideas/Extensions with no license/reply

I'd hesitate to extend Wikimedia Commons restrictions on licensing to other projects; do keep in mind that even material which is perfectly valid in Wikipedia itself (such as the logo of a company appearing on the encyclopaedia page about that company, proprietary but fair use) is banned from Commons.

There are a few cases in which what appears to be an extension is merely a MediaWiki-like wrapper placed around some existing third-party API. This is true of extensions to check Akismet (a Wordpress spambot blacklist) or other lists to check spambots. The externally-supplied API isn't ours to force some arbitrary license onto, however much some contributors here seem to swear by commercial versions of licences like GPL, GFDL, CC-BY-SA which serve to feed your free content to every scraper site on the planet to be mangled and plastered with ads.

This already raises an issue with the current extension code in wiki crusade in that we cannot check the whole package (extension wrapper + third-party base API) into Git/SVN/whatever as the API isn't ours to re-license. We have every right to call the API from our open-source code (that's what it's there for) but it might not explicitly specify any license terms beyond that. Either we check in just a wrapper (which is problematic if the originating site stops distributing the API later, leaving just a hollow shell in the Git repository) or we keep these out of the version control system entirely.

Nonetheless, I don't agree that they deserve to be pulled from the site. We are using the third-party API as its authors intended by calling it from our code; most often, that site will link back to us in their FAQ to indicate "this is what you do to get this working on MediaWiki".

If the vague licensing terms (here's a third-party API, possibly as source code, and whomever created it invites you to wrap your code around it but specifies no specific license beyond that) upset you, perhaps the third-party site could be approached about distributing the MediaWiki extension "wrapper" with the API instead of it being hosted here.

Killing good code just because Wikimedia Commons is CC-BY-SA and thinks that specific license should be forced onto every website on the planet is a bit much, though.