Is there any way we could get some good legal counsel on the copyright/left stuff before we get too far into the new textbook project ? Now is our chance to start fresh and have the licence we want, not stumble into something unideal that we will have to live with later.
Maybe we could license the textbook stuff under no license for the moment until we get things worked out .. it isnt that important to me if anyone "steals" my work, it is better than working and having all of the material stuck under a license scheme designed for software and not for content.
(My textbook plans dont include using much from the WP anyway).
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Karl Wick wrote:
(My textbook plans dont include using much from the WP anyway).
Now there's a thought ... what if each textbook project decides for itself depending on its own estimation of its needs? If a project decides wrongly, then only it has to start over. Sitewide policy can be submitted to the public domain, or kept under GFDL for copying from Wikipedia.
-- Toby
On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 10:08:46PM -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:
Karl Wick wrote:
(My textbook plans dont include using much from the WP anyway).
Now there's a thought ... what if each textbook project decides for itself depending on its own estimation of its needs? If a project decides wrongly, then only it has to start over. Sitewide policy can be submitted to the public domain, or kept under GFDL for copying from Wikipedia.
I think that it would be very unpractical. Keeping everything GFDL makes us bidirectionally compatibe with Wikipedia. Changing license to something else breaks that link.
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Karl Wick wrote:
(My textbook plans dont include using much from the WP anyway).
Now there's a thought ... what if each textbook project decides for itself depending on its own estimation of its needs? If a project decides wrongly, then only it has to start over. Sitewide policy can be submitted to the public domain, or kept under GFDL for copying from Wikipedia.
I think that it would be very unpractical. Keeping everything GFDL makes us bidirectionally compatibe with Wikipedia. Changing license to something else breaks that link.
I think that it's even more impractical to force a decision early. Does your textbook project plan to use material from Wikipedia? Then you want the GNU FDL (you'll /need/ it for your plan). But Karl's doesn't. I doubt that I'd want it either.
Encyclopaedias and textbooks have a quite different style, and I'd argue that any text that isn't completely rewritten is a mistake. But I don't have to force my opinion on your textbook project! Please don't force your opinion on mine (if there is one) or Karl's.
A simple course of action for right now would be to see what licences we find acceptable (so far, we have the GNU FDL and Creative Commons BY-SA), then release material under a disjunction of these. When a textbook project decides that it wants material that's previously appeared under a specific one of these, then it can do so, and restrict its licence appropriately.
-- Toby
textbook-l@lists.wikimedia.org