Computer History Wiki:Copyrights

All text on this Wiki is submitted under and into the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 (the 'GFDL', hereinafter). Although I am not a lawyer (so if its exact meaning is important to you, consult your own lawyer for their evaluation), my interpretation of that lengthy document in legalese is that any text you submit, although you retain the copyright on that text, by submitting it you give the CHWiki a perpetual, non-revocable license to it, under said GFDL. Under it, your text may be edited at will, and spread to the four winds, but will forever be under that license. That license allows others, in turn, to use it, but requires them, in turn, if they do, to accept the terms of that license (including the term under which any reader must be somehow informed of the license).

(In other words, it's close to being in the public domain - but not quite. Text which is actually in the public domain may be modified into what intellectual property lawyers call a 'derivative work' on which you will hold the copyright, and with which you may do entirely as you wish. Not so, the GFDL.)

One advantage of all this is that it is the same license as Wikipedia, and we thus may yank text from them, and they may also copy chunks of text verbatim from this wiki for its own use.