On 4/15/07, Jossi Fresco jossifresco@mac.com wrote:
On Apr 14, 2007, at 12:18 PM, Jossi Fresco wrote:
I was under the impression that once I hit the save button, the content I contribute to WP can only be reused under the GFDL.
<snip> WP:C#Contributors' rights and obligations: If you contribute material to Wikipedia, you thereby license it to the public under the GFDL (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). In order to contribute, you must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either
* you hold the copyright to the material, for instance becauseyou produced it yourself, or * you acquired the material from a source that allows the licensing under GFDL, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under GFDL.
In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract the GFDL license for the versions you placed here: that material will remain under GFDL forever.
In the second case, if you incorporate external GFDL materials, as a requirement of the GFDL, you need to acknowledge the authorship and provide a link back to the network location of the original copy.
</snip>
My reading of the above is that one you submit material to WP "you can never retract the GFDL" and that the "GFDL is forever".
I may be missing something here, so I would appreciate some help with this.
-- Jossi
The GFDL is non-exclusive, meaning that although you cannot retract the licence, you can license the same GFDLed material under another licence, as you retain the copyright to it: "You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like." It is indeed impossible to revoke the GFDL for material placed on WP; nobody is stopping you, however, from placing that same material under a different licence in the future.
Johnleemk