Mav wrote:

Toby wrote:

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If a textbook project that wants to use material from Wikipedia, then it can make a decision that it wants this material more than the mere possibility of material under some other licence.

And where exactly is the material from this other license at? That type of long term planning is also really bizarre in the wiki world - where are the crystal balls we should use in order to find out what license this magical text will be under? However, what we have /right now/ is a HUGE open content resource that will almost certainly be ENORMOUS in a couple years. This is a prediction we can bank on.

I think that you've got our positions backwards. I'm not using any crystal ball -- you are. Your crystal ball tells you (somehow): * No textbook will ever want to use material that's free but incompatible with the GNU FDL; and * No project using a licence that the GNU FDL is incompatible with will ever want to use material from a Wikimedia textbook. True, I can't find any counterexamples for these claims. But the burden of proof lies with /you/, who insist on fixing everything in the GNU FDL to begin with.

Remember, if your textbook uses material from Wikipedia, then with my plan it'll use just the GNU FDL, and with my blessings. But you want to force all of the other textbooks to do the same, without any evidence that the crystal ball predictions above are true. You accuse me of "long term planning [...] in the wiki world", implying that I'm inhibiting the quick editing practices of wiki. That is simply false. Any edit that you want to make can be made. I only ask that you not make decisions that aren't yet needed. I'm /refusing/ to plan ahead for a (possibly phantom) long term future in which only GNU FDL (and freer) material will be wanted.

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If you have a specific use in mind for a large chunk of text, then this shouldn't be a very difficult choice to make!

Yep - use Wikipedia and public domain text as your primary resources (it is gotten us this far!).

It's gotten us how far? We haven't written any textbooks! If you meant that it's gotten us so far on /Wikipedia/ (with a "p"), then I'm pretty sure that you don't want to use this analogy, which suggests that it's safe for Wikibooks to use CC alone if we like. (The fair analogy is between �Wikipedia and PD got us more Wikipedia.� and �Wikibooks and PD will get us more Wikibooks.�.)

I still would like to know of /any/ other body of open content text at all comparable to Wikipedia that we could use for textbooks.

And I'd like to know how you know that none will ever appear (and that none will appear in the reverse direction). /You/ want to impose the restriction, so the burden lies with /you/.

Mixing and matching licenses will prevent the free exchange of text to and from Wikipedia and most madenly from between our textbooks!

??? Did you think this example through clearly? No exchange can be hindered by a disjunctive licence, because a GNU-only project can always borrow from a disjunctive one, and a disjunctive project can become GNU-only if it decides to borrow from a GNU-only project. (And the same is true replacing GNU with CC above.) Only your insistence on a single licence can hinder free exchange.

It is best to work with what we have right now and continually work with the copyleft viral license makers to make their licenses compatible with each other.

Of course we agree that the licence makers should do this. And if they do, then this discussion will become irrelevant. But I don't want to pin all of my hopes on that. Perhaps you have good reason to think that they will? Personally, I doubt that the FSF would go along with such a scheme. '_`

PLEASE let's not fork the project before it even starts.

A fork between Wikipedia and Wikibooks is hard to avoid; even if the latter borrows from the former to start with, their versions must diverge as they're edited for different purposes. Now, if a single textbook forks into a GNU version and a CC version, then these can never be reconciled (without licence changes), but even so this is a better situation than under your plan, which would simply delete the CC version from history entirely. Still, I doubt that such a fork would ever happen; it would require a choice to go (say) GNU first for some GNU material, then to find enough good (say) CC material that you want to drop all that (and all the changes made since then) and return to an earlier state. And you doubt the very existence of such CC material, so forks will indeed never happen if you're correct.

Let me ask you a question: If there were no Wikipedia or any source like it, would you still want to start Wikipedia on the GNU FDL alone? Wouldn't you prefer to start it on a disjunctive licence now? (So far, Wikipedia hasn't relied on importing FDL material, so it would probably still be dijunctively licensed after 2� years; certainly once it grew this big, that would be hard to change.) Surely we can agree that disjunction is best in that case! Imagine a world in which everything is released disjunctively; there's no need for the licence makers to get their acts together (which is to say, no problem if it turns out that they don't), because the disjunction would itself be the one single free content licence. Even better, if one person messed up and left a licence out, then /some/ exchange would still be possible, albeit less; whereas /no/ exchange is possible between WP and any CC SA material. A disjunctively licensed WP can be used by more people, so it is freer, so it is better.

In the real world, Wikipedia is using only the GNU FDL, and it's hard to blame WP for this, since it was begun 2� years ago. GNU FDL alone would still be reasonable for textbooks (much as GNU GPL is quite reasonable for software) if it were already the established copyleft of choice in that field. But CC licences are more likely to be chosen by others, since: * The CC licences are simpler than the GNU licences; * CC SA is freer than GNU FDL (no Invariant Sections); and * The CC documentation is easier to understand than the FSF stuff. I wouldn't recommend the GNU FDL to anybody starting a new project outside of territory where that licence is already established (like manuals for free software), because it's overkill. In 2001, Wikipedia didn't have much other choice. Now we do.

To be sure, if you move recipes from Wikipedia to a Wikimedia cookbook (the sort of thing that you and Erik agree should be in Wikibooks too), then you're going to have to use the GNU FDL. So use it, I agree. But if I start a math textbook, then I won't want material from Wikipedia, because the encyclopaedic writing style is inappropriate for a math text. (Older versions of some articles are written more in a textbook style, but older versions are untrustworthy anyway just over facts.) So why do you want to saddle my project with the GNU licence, when next year I may find a CC SA textbook to join forces with? True, I have no reason to think that I'll ever find such a thing -- but if I don't, then I lose nothing with my disjunctive licence; while if I do, then I lose it entirely with your single licence. (And if my impression that I won't want to borrow from WP is wrong, then I still lose nothing with my disjunctive licence.)

-- Toby