Fastfission wrote:
And now... for something completely different.
<snip>
The idea of multi-licensing has been pursued on the
project at
different times, whereby contributions are indicates as being
licenseable under the GFDL or another, similarly "free" license (i.e.,
CC-BY-SA or CC-SA). There was also the big push, awhile ago, to get
users to put templates on their user pages indicating that their
present, future, and, I think, *past* contributions were
multi-licensed as well -- I believe it had to do with making certain
articles compatible with WikiCities' license. The basic idea was to
run a bot to find all of the "authors" the articles in question and
see if they would agree to this. I don't know how this worked out, but
it was an interesting idea.
It initially started with the Rambot articles, so that WikiTravel could
use them.
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.
Um, Stallman says CC is bad, because people assume that all Creative
Commons licenses are the same without understanding the consequences -
so people don't understand why cc-by-nd-nc isn't a Free license. "But
it's Creative Commons!" they protest. "You use /that/ stuff which is
Creative Commons, so why not mine?"
If this principle works -- couldn't we change the
terms of use? That
is, instead of every edit being licenseable under the GFDL, couldn't
we change it to say that "this contribution, and any other
contribution I have previously made, is licenseable under the GFDL or
any other similarly 'free' license"? It wouldn't necessarily get *all*
of the content out of the GFDL but, if we assume that many of the
editors now were editors previously, it would potentially "free up" a
very large amount of content. If an individual editor objected to this
for some reason (I can't imagine why, but let's just say they did),
then they'd be prohibited from editing, the same way we do when people
suddenly claim that the intent to retain copyright on their edits.
Well, you'd need to define "similarly free" first...
Supposing that this was put into place, all that would change from an
editor's point of view would be the edit page - instead of "Content must
not violate any copyright and must be verifiable. You agree to license
your contributions under the GFDL", it would have the name of the other
license/complex licensing conditions.
Speaking of people objecting to our current licensing, check out
[[Talk:Bruce Perens]]. Apparantly he objects to us having an article on
him, because he has issues with the license we are using... oh, and
apparantly we're neither a Free Software project *or* an Open Source
project. Hrm.
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