Fastfission wrote:
And now... for something completely different.
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The idea of multi-licensing has been pursued on the project at different times, whereby contributions are indicates as being licenseable under the GFDL or another, similarly "free" license (i.e., CC-BY-SA or CC-SA). There was also the big push, awhile ago, to get users to put templates on their user pages indicating that their present, future, and, I think, *past* contributions were multi-licensed as well -- I believe it had to do with making certain articles compatible with WikiCities' license. The basic idea was to run a bot to find all of the "authors" the articles in question and see if they would agree to this. I don't know how this worked out, but it was an interesting idea.
It initially started with the Rambot articles, so that WikiTravel could use them.
Based on this principle: can one really ask users to re-(multi)-license their PAST contributions? That is, can I say, "All those contributions I said were under the GFDL? Well, now I want them to also be GFDL or CC-BY-SA." Legally, I'm suspicious, but I'm also not a lawyer.
Um, Stallman says CC is bad, because people assume that all Creative Commons licenses are the same without understanding the consequences - so people don't understand why cc-by-nd-nc isn't a Free license. "But it's Creative Commons!" they protest. "You use /that/ stuff which is Creative Commons, so why not mine?"
If this principle works -- couldn't we change the terms of use? That is, instead of every edit being licenseable under the GFDL, couldn't we change it to say that "this contribution, and any other contribution I have previously made, is licenseable under the GFDL or any other similarly 'free' license"? It wouldn't necessarily get *all* of the content out of the GFDL but, if we assume that many of the editors now were editors previously, it would potentially "free up" a very large amount of content. If an individual editor objected to this for some reason (I can't imagine why, but let's just say they did), then they'd be prohibited from editing, the same way we do when people suddenly claim that the intent to retain copyright on their edits.
Well, you'd need to define "similarly free" first...
Supposing that this was put into place, all that would change from an editor's point of view would be the edit page - instead of "Content must not violate any copyright and must be verifiable. You agree to license your contributions under the GFDL", it would have the name of the other license/complex licensing conditions.
Speaking of people objecting to our current licensing, check out [[Talk:Bruce Perens]]. Apparantly he objects to us having an article on him, because he has issues with the license we are using... oh, and apparantly we're neither a Free Software project *or* an Open Source project. Hrm.