Alex R. wrote:
I am not certain why there is a discussion of assigning copyright to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course anyone is free to make such a contribution (though I doubt they will get a tax deduction for it) but it is not necessary IMHO for Wikimedia to use materials under the open license it already has, perhaps I do not understand the question, but what specifically cannot be acheived with the current open license that every Wikipedia contributor grants when they make contributions to any Wikipedia space?
I would say that the primary driving concern that we have is that there are starting to be materials published under other free and copyleft licenses (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike being most prominent) that are incompatible with the GNU FDL. We'd love to be able to cut and paste willy-nilly between all free resources, but we can't, due to issues of license incompatibility.
http://www.wikitravel.org, or example, is CC ATT-SA, so we can't use their materials and they can't use ours, not without specific permission. That's a real shame, and it's why I'm trying to get them to change their license while they are just starting to get off the ground.
--Jimbo