On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 12:55 AM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
How can we "force" anyone to do anything? It's always been, "play by our rules and your contribs are welcome. If not, see you later." And that is true for legal things like GFDL and merely community norms like NPOV or even a Manual of Style. What is wrong with having a community norm that if a book is stated as being dual-licensed, other editors must contribute to the book under the same set of licenses?
This still ignores the possibility that some combinations of licenses will have a chilling effect on the pool of contributors. An unpopular license combination, or one that is overly confusing could stunt the growth of a book prematurely. Conversely, I dont see a benefit in terms of contributorship that multi-licensing will bring. If we demand one of the two licenses in a multilicensed scheme be GFDL, then we aren't going to expand our pool of potential donations at all.
I'm still seeing, and I dont think anybody has addressed this point yet, that we are trading ease-of-use at Wikibooks for increased ease-of-use elsewhere. We're bringing complexity to our site and our community in exchange for increased simplicitly elsewhere. And, to marginalize it further, we have thousands of books already which are GFDL-only and cannot be relicensed. The number of books we do have are going to be limited to a relatively small number which are to be created with the possibility that their editing communities will be limited because of license complexity.
I just don't see us as being at a level of maturity and stability where we can afford to be making things harder for ourselves for some amorphous benefit in reuse at other places. Most of our books simply aren't mature enough that they are worth being reused in other places yet anyway. Plus (and as a software guy, Rob should understand this too) we open up a window where changes made by downstream reusers cannot be brought back upstream to benefit our books and our communities. People can make derivatives of our works in such a way that Wikibooks cannot reuse and benefit from those derivatives. This is a violation of the very spirit of the GFDL and other "share alike" copyleft licenses, even if it's not a violation of the word of the licenses.
Somebody please show that I am wrong, but the more I think about this issue the more pessimistic I become about it.
--Andrew Whitworth