On 02/04/2008, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)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."
1) 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.
2) "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.