On 3/3/06, Fastfission <fastfission(a)gmail.com> wrote:
So how to escape?
Easy! Three steps:
1. Get everyone who has ever contributed to WP to revoke their GFDL
licensing, and re-license the stuff as whatever;
2. Buy out the copyright in all derivative works (ie, all the forks);
3. Buy out all the mirrors.
Based on this principle: can one really ask users to
re-(multi)-license their PAST contributions? That is, can I say, "All
those contributions I said were under the GFDL? Well, now I want them
to also be GFDL or CC-BY-SA." Legally, I'm suspicious, but I'm also
not a lawyer.
If you own the copyright you can release it under whatever licence you
choose. Someone changing to multi-licencing can make all their past
edits available under a different licence without any problems - it
simply takes effect from the date they multi-licence.
It is just a thought I had -- the only one I could
come up with which
seems really plausible, aside from the possibility of the FSF being
convinced to make updates to the GFDL (which I suspect they would be
very dubious about, especially if the edits were primarily to benefit
Wikipedia).
While other ways forward are theoretically possible, in practice this
is our best option. All the content is already licenced under "GFDL
1.2 or any later version." I can't recall where I saw it exactly, but
I do remember some FSF people talking about making future versions of
the GFDL more compatible with projects like WP. Our use of GFDL is
good for everyone, including the FSF, so I wouldn't put it completely
out of consideration that they'd make the next versions better for us!
--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain(a)gmail.com