On 10/24/07, Nilfanion nilfanion@googlemail.com wrote:
It is easy to fix one image, but I suspect we have deeper problems throughout the project with a lack of respect for copyleft. Establishing just how serious this issue is will be non-trivial, never mind resolving it.
It's one of the downsides of allowing so many incompatible copyleft licenses -- if you really want to be scrupulous you have to create crazy licensing schemes on the derivative images. This is one of the reasons people should be encouraged to multi-license (GFDL/CC/etc.) -- otherwise you end up with competing flavors of copyleft that are not compatible and are in the end no great increase in freedom.
I've thought for a long time that we should have a category of generic copyleft license that basically said that the WMF could add additional licenses to that category over time as long as they met a few basic requirements. So I would license an image as "Generic WMF-approved copyleft" and the license itself would say that GFDL and CC-BY-SA were currently included in that, but if in the future SuperCopyLeftLicense was developed then the WMF could deliberate and decide if it was included as well, and this could apply retroactively (in the same way that the FSF can update the GFDL as they see fit). To me that would seem like the perfect way to encourage interchangability over the long and short terms (will the GFDL be used for anything but Wikimedia-related projects in the next ten years? Was it really the best license to commit to? Why commit to any one license, why not leave it open just enough to allow evolution but constrained in such a way to make abuse unlikely?).
But nobody seems that enthusiastic about the idea but me. Oh well. :-(
FF