On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.comwrote:
Or to put it another way, is GFDL freer or less-free than PD?
Less free. Explicitly so. There are strict and specific limitations on what you can do with GFDL content. The goal, of course, is that in the end a GFDL regime will be more free on the whole, but that requires that the world is full of GFDL regimes. If it is not, then using GFDL content (or CC content or whatever) becomes fairly difficult unless you can re-negotiate the license.
(This is one of the reasons I had long supported the idea of more flexible free licenses, like the ability to multi-license at a later date* if, for example, a new copyleft regime emerges that is more desirable than GFDL and is incompatible with it. In the end, since nobody seemed to care a whole lot about this, I just decided that I should re-license everything of mine as PD.)
(*What I envisioned here was some sort of "trust," bundle license, that would say, "I give X the ability to license my contributions and to multi-license it in the future assuming that the following Y conditions are met by the license in question." So content that was GFDL today could be CC-SA tomorrow, or XY-AB ten years from now, as long as certain core requirements were met, like ability to use commercially, must be viral in some way, etc. In short it would be a hedge-your-bets measure -- don't rely on the fact that GFDL will be used in the future, because it might not, and ideally one licensed with GFDL in the first place because one wanted maximum reuse, which again only works if you have a lot of GFDL use in the first place. But I repeat myself.)
FF