Alex756 wrote:

It is ironic that these various licenses are incompatible with each other, maybe a simpler solution would be to have a very straightforward license like has been used commonly in areas where non-exclusive licensing is a commercial reality and just make sure that attribution is preserved (sort of like the moral rights approach of European copyright) isn't that what we all really want when we talk about open content?

You are asking the wrong question since we want our content to be free, not just open. I, at least, get a very positive feeling from knowing that everything I write will be free forever. If all we required was attribution then a proprietary encyclopedia could take our work, improve upon it, sell it as a proprietary work and we would not be able to build upon their improvements; the chain of positive feedback would be broken.

But the GFDL does have some serious problems compared with the Creative Commons Share Alike Licence (such as onerous compliance measures that we don't even bother to enforce on downstream users; such as having transparent copies, distribution of the whole GFDL license with each copy and a changelog). However, we are stuck with the GFDL because that was the best option available when Wikipedia started. So, IMO, we should keep things simple by having just one license for all Wikimedia projects and we should work with the GNU people to create a GFDL 2.0 which is compatible with CCSA (and then work with the CC people to make a CCSA 2.0 that is compatible with GFDL 2.0 or later). We can't ignore the huge resource of free content that is already in our own family - Wikipedia.

But I would still like to know if we could require all new submissions to be more flexibly licensed so that Wikimedia could re-license the text under one of several copyleft licenses. We still, officially, would be a GFDL shop but downstream users could ask the Foundation about re-licencing selected Wikimedia works under other copyleft licenses (of course this would only be for content submitted after a certain date and any content by users who explicitly agree to let Wikimedia re-license their work under other copyleft licenses - I'm sure there will be plenty of those). This, IMO, would be an acceptable (but not ideal) situation until the GNU and CC people get their act together.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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