On 02/04/2008, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
Peter Ansell schreef:
The text at the bottom of the page with a reference to another page which adds conditions is still quite unclear to me. If the following were at the bottom of each page it would eliminate the necessity to go to another page to discover that the license linked on the page contains an optional restriction which wikipedia uses.
"All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.1 or later with no invariant sections."
- You mean version 1.2 there. We have no rights to distribute the major
part of our contents (everything written after June 2003) under version 1.1 of the GFDL.
Well, maybe there is no clear "all text" statement that can be made here, as some of it must be distributed using the terms of the original contributor, of which version 1.2 may be the chosen version for display on wikipedia but version 1.1 should be available for people who choose to if the text derived from before June 2003. I still do not see how it is up to wikipedia to be allowed to specify the base version which may be chosen by users when contributors in the past had a wider range of possible licenses to choose from for the same content. Content providers of free material should not reduce the rights of consumers, or attempt to hide the fact that they are reducing their rights IMO.
- "no invariant sections" is not a restriction. The terms at the bottom
of each page are our copyright statement: it's for re-users of our content. It means they do not need to copy any part of the page if they don't want to. It's a right they have.
It's a restriction for our contributors, yes. They may not add any invariant sections. But that is on each edit page quite clearly.
It is a clarification, without it one could read that you are distributing under GFDL 1.2 and since your statement there did not include the clarification it would not be deemed necessary. The fact that apart from the section on Wikipedia:Copyrights about no invariants, the entirety of the rest of the page is changes quite regularly for a Copyright statement.