Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Karl Wick wrote:
(My textbook plans dont include using much from the WP anyway).
Now there's a thought ... what if each textbook project decides for itself depending on its own estimation of its needs? If a project decides wrongly, then only it has to start over. Sitewide policy can be submitted to the public domain, or kept under GFDL for copying from Wikipedia.
I think that it would be very unpractical. Keeping everything GFDL makes us bidirectionally compatibe with Wikipedia. Changing license to something else breaks that link.
I think that it's even more impractical to force a decision early. Does your textbook project plan to use material from Wikipedia? Then you want the GNU FDL (you'll /need/ it for your plan). But Karl's doesn't. I doubt that I'd want it either.
Encyclopaedias and textbooks have a quite different style, and I'd argue that any text that isn't completely rewritten is a mistake. But I don't have to force my opinion on your textbook project! Please don't force your opinion on mine (if there is one) or Karl's.
A simple course of action for right now would be to see what licences we find acceptable (so far, we have the GNU FDL and Creative Commons BY-SA), then release material under a disjunction of these. When a textbook project decides that it wants material that's previously appeared under a specific one of these, then it can do so, and restrict its licence appropriately.
-- Toby