Hi Nilfanion, On Thu, March 13, 2008 5:43 pm, Nilfanion wrote: While not criticizing your decision itself, I just wonder why you did not take the actual use of this template into account. We are currently having some problems with User:Steschke [1] illustrating the current typical usage of this license. AFAIK Gmaxwell is the only contributor broadly releasing files as GFDL-1.2 who did not retract GFDL-self. Regards, Adrian / Codeispoetry [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Steschke/licence&di… and following diffs (the ip is steschke itself while blocked)

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 8:11 PM, Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh(a)gmail.com> wrote: That should have said "Deleting it implies deleting 3867 images".

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 8:20 PM, Codeispoetry <codeispoetry(a)adrianlang.de> wrote: I agree that the template is being misued. However there are also users who are not misusing this template. The correct course of action would be applying the banhammer to people misusing this template. Bryan

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 12:20 PM, Codeispoetry <codeispoetry(a)adrianlang.de> wrote: Could you elaborate on what you are refering to? It is hard for me to imagine how the presense of absense of "or later versions" could really be a significant disruption to the project, given that there isn't even a later version to refer to. -Robert A. Rohde PS. Along with Gmaxwell, I am one of those people who uses GFDL-1.2 rather than simply GFDL because as a matter of principle I prefer not to agree to new licenses until I've at least had a chance to review them.

On Thu, March 13, 2008 9:33 pm, Robert Rohde wrote: As far as I know there are current efforts to greatly enhance compatibility between GFDL and CC-by-sa, this of course would need a new GFDL version. There is a common practice of some de users to use GFDL as sort of noncommercial license since GFDL basically does not allow any commercial use for practical reasons, and they want to keep it that way with limiting there files to 1.2. This winter there were even mass edits relicensing CC files to GFDL and later hiding the old version and licensing via commons transfer. These activities clearly were not performed with the idea of free content in mind and thus against one of our major guidelines. I'm sorry for associating you with such efforts, that was not my intention ;-) Regards, Adrian / Codeispoetry

I'm not sure where the thoughts on the de WP that GFDL-1.2 is not free came from specifically, but I suspect that they are thinking solely in terms of print reuse - not that significant. The most important downstream use of Commons materiel is electronic anyway, so GFDL-1.2 is as free as Wikipedia at the present. As for my rationale, I tried to avoid weighing up the template itself heavily (apart from to see that there are good reasons on both sides). I've given a more detailed rationale to my decision at http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Disputes_noticeboard… and I think I'm right in saying that most contributors to this thread who had not participated on COM:DEL, only became aware of it due to my initial post. I agree with Bryan's initial post here: misuse of a template should be dealt with by resolving issues with the users not the template. The help of de.wp admins to determine what images have been made less free through this would be beneficial, but that exploit is no reason to delete in of and as of itself imo.