DokuWiki: Clarification on Using DokuWiki for Internal Documentation by Programmers

Question

Hello StackOverflow community,

I am considering using DokuWiki as a documentation tool instead of Zim for internal use within our development team. We may open source (under various licenses) or even sell such software including the created documentation.

I've noticed the standard DokuWiki web page footer that states:

Except where otherwise noted, content on this wiki is licensed under the following license: CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International.

I want to ensure that our usage for internal documentation by programmers, even in the context of potential commercial software development, aligns with the license terms and does not violate any restrictions.

My specific question are:

1. If we create documentation using DokuWiki, does it mean that the documentation cannot be sold together with our software?
2. Is any proprietary documentation we create using this tool covered by the non-commercial CC Attribution license as stated in the note?

Note: We don't intend to distribute DokuWiki, although we may include some scripts for installation if the developer wishes to use it.

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Update

Yes, it appears that DokuWiki actually enforces the content you create and possibly even view to be covered by a non-commercial CC Attribution license!

Therefore, do not use it for any proprietary documentation.

Answer 1

You can use whatever license you want for your own content. The contents of dokuwiki.org are under CC-BY (which is not CC-BY-NC so it does not even enforce non-commercial use). But again, you pick the licence you want for your own content.

See https://www.dokuwiki.org/faq:license for more info.

Answer 2

One should always differentiate between the license of the

1. wiki software
2. content of a given wiki (not your own wiki, presumably)
3. content of your wiki

The DokuWiki "license" setting locally configures the license under which the content of your wiki can be distributed. This can be achieved on first install by help of the DokuWiki Installer and later by the DokuWiki Configuration Settings.

The several default licenses you can choose in this setting are pre-configured and contain a "Non chosen" option. However, you are free adding a new license of your own chosing by specifically creating a new conf/license.local.php file to add your entries.

Furthermore, the quite responsive sprintdoc Template provides a "copyright notice" setting in addition. However, there is a range of other templates available.

See

• https://www.dokuwiki.org/config:license - Adding a new license
• https://www.dokuwiki.org/config - Configuring DokuWiki
• https://www.dokuwiki.org/template:sprintdoc - The sprintdoc Template

for more info.