On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 12:55 AM, Brianna Laugher
<brianna.laugher(a)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