On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote:
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