Once again, a big *thank you* to the licensing committee for administering the voting process. All the volunteers on the committee have been hugely helpful. I want to especially mention Robert Rohde, without whom the result probably wouldn't have been ready last week.

Thanks to everyone for handling the process so cleanly, and with an abundance of good information. Would it be possible to change the license switch to August 1 rather than June 15? I would like to point out the next major step, for which there is no time to lose : content compatibility with other GFDL sites will become impossible on August 1 -- after then, not only will we no longer be able to import materials currently under the GFDL (which will become impossible as soon as we decide to switch over licenses), but it will also no longer be possible for currently GFDL massively-collaborative sites to choose to make the same switchover that we are making (the GFDL provision is only valid until August 1).

Incidentally, the news coverage of this event so far has been quite limited, which makes it more important that we have an outreach effort to communicate what is happening to other GFDL projects that may wish to change.

Wikinews has never used GFDL or cc-by-sa, it uses cc-by. Therefore, this license change will not be affecting Wikinews.

Congratulations to everyone involved in the effort to get this happening! It's been a long road - a longer road than many of us have seen. Just a quick point I'd like to raise about Wikinews in relation to the license change. Wikinews has never used GFDL or cc-by-sa, it uses cc-by. Therefore, this license change will not be affecting Wikinews. As a result I think it's important that we don't say in any of our public statements on this topic "all Wikimedia projects are changing...". Instead I suggest that we use phrases like "all GFDL content" or "All relevant Wikimedia projects" or something like that. The board statement is ambiguous on this point. It says "...to relicense the Wikimedia sites..." but the Wikimedia Foundation blog said "the Wikimedia Foundation will proceed with the implementation of a CC-BY-SA/GFDL dual license system *on all of our project’s* content." [my emphasis]. The licensing update <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update> page on Meta does specify that we are only talking about content which is currently GFDL: "to make all content currently distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License (with “later version” clause) additionally available under CC-BY-SA 3.0, as explicitly allowed through the latest version of the GFDL;" Once again, congratulations everyone on the hard work and diligent effort on this complicated issue. -Liam [[witty lama]] p.s. I suppose the same point goes for Wikimedia Commons which includes a whole variety of licenses including much in the Public Domain. wittylama.com/blog Sent from Sydney, Nsw, Australia _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

I have been keeping an eye on what content got imported on English Wikibooks. If there has been anything imported from offsite GFDL-only sources I'm not aware of it. To be honest though, that's not saying much - we often have contributors bring us whole books they wrote elsewhere - but that's not a violation since they'd be the copyright holder and can relicense it however they want. I doubt there are any similar cases which do violate the terms, but I'd love some help checking that.

2009/5/23 Mike.lifeguard &lt;mikelifeguard(a)fastmail.fm&gt;fm>: What are licensing requirements for Wikibooks and Wikisource? Did they require GFDL or would any free license do, as is the case for Commons? (I would have thought a freer choice of licenses would have been feasible, since works are likely to stay separate. I'd have particularly thought this the case for Wikisource.) - d.

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 7:05 AM, Samuel Klein &lt;meta.sj(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Three points: 1) We'd like to have all our copyright statements, terms of use, image templates, and whatever else updated before the August 1st deadline. That way there is no ambiguity about whether content was relicensed in a timely fashion.  Doing that, including the various translations, will require a significant lead time. 2) The migration is an incentive to other sites to also relicense. Given that, it behooves us to get moving early enough that other sites will also have time to react before the deadline.  Seeing the changes we make will also give them a blueprint to what they may need to do. Incidentally, the news coverage of this event so far has been quite limited, which makes it more important that we have an outreach effort to communicate what is happening to other GFDL projects that may wish to change. 3) Content importing from GFDL sites (which are not also CC-BY-SA, and do not get relicensed by their owners) is already impossible now.  One of the provisions of the relicensing is that externally published content (i.e. material originally published somewhere other than a WMF wiki) can only be relicensed if it was already in our site before November 1, 2008.  Any GFDL text imported after that date will probably have to be deleted.  This doesn't happen very often on the Wikipedias, but it is a bigger concern for Wikibooks and Wikisource. -Robert Rohde _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

There are hundreds of educational sites with excellent material that have chosen their current GFDL license in order to be compatible with Wikipedia. Some of them will not be able to decide to switch licensing terms by August 1; others do not qualify for the license-switching option in the first place. We should make a serious devoted effort to reach all of them -- including informing readers about what is going on and how they can help preserve compatibility of license with their own sites.

This is very important. Wikis licensed under the GFDL after August 1st will not be compatible with Wikimedia wikis. Those wikis will sometimes be able to pull from Wikimedia projects but will never be able to merge their content into Wikimedia wikis.