I recently met with Larry Lessig and we discussed at some length the issue of licensing for Wikinews. Based on that conversation, I think we should move fairly quickly towards adoption of CC-BY, and in particular we should be looking hard at the proposed Creative Commons wiki licensing model. There is another possibility which we should probably consider -- one which was not possible for Wikipedia when it started -- which is some form of additional "site licensing" requirement. If we are not GNU FDL compatible anyway, I think there is little cost to doing this. The idea is this: contributors agree to release everything under CC-BY (Wiki version) but they *also* give the Wikimedia Foundation the right to do anything we like with it. By doing this, we hold open the possibility of a relicensing to something compatible with FDL 2.0 someday (maybe). Wikipedia couldn't do this when we started because people would not have been happy giving a special license to Bomis or to me. But Wikimedia Foundation now is trusted and for good reason. We have been public-domain for a while, and Lessig is telling us that this is not tenable in the long run. The problem is that to effectively place something literally into the public domain is significantly more difficult than it should be. Simply saying so is certainly not enough, and what we are doing right now is almost certainly not enough. - --Jimbo