On 6/10/07, Brock Weller <brock.weller(a)gmail.com> wrote:
An author can license his work to as many people under
as many licenses as
possible. Nonrevokable just means you cant take away the GFDL licensed
version you gave wikipedia. You can have a all rights reserved copy you give
someone else, they are also just free to use the GFDL copy if they prefer
to. And you can also give wikipedia a CC copy, and/or PD copy, all with one
submit click.
You're missing my point. When you contribute to an already existing
article, you are making a derivative work based on that article, which
is licensed under the GFDL. The GFDL states that if you make a
derivative work from it you have to license it under the same terms,
you can't just PD that thing because you are using the original
authors work and he didn't allow you to do that.
Lets make an open source software analogy: if I make my own
web-browser that is based on Firefox, I can't license that software in
anyway I want (whether it is to make it less free by making it closed
source or making it more free by using the BSD license) because the
GPL doesn't allow that kind of relicensing. Same thing with the GFDL,
you can't just change the rights of something that someone else wrote
unless that person specifically allowed it. You are only allowed to
make derivatives of someone else's work if you follow the rules, and
multi-licensing doesn't follow those rules (in my understanding,
anyway).