On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Not really. The GFDL tells you what you *can* do, not what you *can't* do. If you want to apply the GFDL to a work, first you have to define "the Document". You can't really do this without actually reading the license.
Frankly it's difficult to make the GFDL work for much of any of what Wikipedia is doing. It doesn't fit in straightforwardly with section 4 part A, B, C, D, E, F, I, or J. And the other parts aren't really in compliance so much as they just don't apply. You could probably make some convoluted definitions of "the Document" to kind of sort of be in compliance with some of the license, but if I defined "the Document" for you and then explained how that definition didn't work I'd just be creating a strawman argument.
I think "the Document" is usually taken as meaning an individual page. How does that definition fail?
A. The title of modified versions is not distinct. B. No authors are listed on the title page. C. No publisher is listed on the title page. D. There are no copyright notices. E. There are no copyright notices. F. There are no copyright notices and no license notice in the form of the addendum listed in the GFDL. H. There is no copy of the license. I. There is no section entitled History for most pages. For those pages where there is a section entitled History, it doesn't have any of the required information.