LittleDan wrote:

AFAICT, The FSF has no discression over how we use the licence unless they sue us. And if we , for example, switch wikipedia to the Creative Commons, then nothing bad can happen without lawsuit for something like which licence's text was there, which is extremely unlikely IMO. But many wikipedians think it is unethical to not follow the GNU FDL.

Any individual Wikipedia contributor could sue us, if we relicense their work under a CC licence without their authorisation. Such a lawsuit might not get far in a legal sense -- what's the basis for damages, financially speaking? -- but it would generate terrible publicity. Why terrible publicity. Because it's unethical! I don't think that contributions should automatically go under the FDL, since I have objections to the FDL (the nonfree options) and using a single licence is problematic anyway (for later users). But if there are people that contributed to Wikipedia only because it used the GNU FDL specifically and nothing else, then relicensing their material -- even if we got away with it in practice -- would be a violation of their trust.

Here's my impression of how the license works. Things submitted to Wikipedia (and wikibooks) are still owned by the people who submit them, Wikipedia is just licensed to use it under the GNU FDL. If all authors of a particular page (including anons) agree to relicense the page under, say, the Creative Commons Share-Alike, the page may be relicenced.

True; and in specific situations, we may want to look into that. For example, if you want to use any page that I substantially wrote, my global permissions statement http://math.ucr.edu/~toby/copyright/ may allow you to take sentences, paragraphs, sections, even entire articles in a few cases, to use as you will.

But that would be stupid and pointless. However, it would be very useful in wikibooks, as a textbook module might, for example, use some creative-commons sharealike licenced things. I'm not sure, but I think that we can even say "Above this line was licenced under the GNU FDL, below this line is licenced under the Creative Commons Sharealike."

Combining the two sides of the line is tricky here; for the FDL, they'd have to be an "aggregate", which a single module is unlikely to be. But we could do such a thing from module to module. Still, a printed book might have trouble using both types of modules; some automated checking of this sort of thing would be helpful. Of course, we may never have any CC modules -- that remains to be seen. If not, there'll never be any conflicts within Wikimedia; the benefit of not automatically classifying modules as GNU FDL would then be to potential users of our material /other/ than Wikimedia.

-- Toby