IANAL... IANAIPL.. but I read Slashdot a lot (isn't that just as good?) and I don't remember any headlines saying "Supreme court decides in favor of GPL!" Even the GPL is a bit up in the air. Now, the GFDL... I don't think there's any really big, important project _except_ Wikipedia, and I don't think Wikipedia has ever engaged in any lawsuits in which the GFDL played any kind of role whatsoever. The GFDL is so legally puzzling that Wikipedia itself can't give nice, simple, crystal-clear rules on how to re-use Wikipedia content. Nobody understand what the attribution and history rules really mean and what does or does not satisfy them in practice. And none of what anyone thinks they might understand has ever been tested in court. Suppose Citizendium does go ahead and reuse big chunks of Wikipedia under some complicated legal mishmash of a license, and let's suppose the essence of the situation is that a) in a broad sort of way, Citizendium allows free-as-in-freedom re-use; b) Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation, and the EFF all agree that whatever Citizendium is doing can be characterized as a "free license." Who the heck is going to sue Citizendium? Nobody has a big stake in their Wikipedia contributions. There's no money involved. And so many of the issues involve other licenses being _less_ free than GFDL. Who is going to pay the big lawyers' fees? And pay for a photographer to take the twenty-five eight-by-ten color photographs with arrows and a paragraph on the back to bring to court, showing which paragraphs were in which versions of what when under which license? And there probably isn't even anything resembling a case _until a third party re-uses Citizendium content_. "Your honor, this print publisher will testify that they WOULD have published a print book based on Citizendium content, and it WOULD have included MY paragraphs, if Citizendium hadn't used a noncommercial license. And if they had, they would have paid me exactly nothing at all. And I've been terribly hurt by the fact that they don't have the _potential_ to reuse my work without paying me. Or maybe they do, but they aren't sure they do, because the Citizendium license is so tangled and murky and self-contradictory. So I've been deprived of the precious opportunity to see my name in print and to get paid nothing for it. Unless they use the Wikipedia version, of course, which they don't want to do because, they just don't." And the other side says "Your honor, please ask the plaintiff, Horace Wadsworth Pennypacker II, SSN 078-05-1120, to _prove_ that he is indeed user 'Pfiffltriggi.'" The only way this can ever be a problem is if Jimbo decides to have Wikipedia sue Citizendium based on ego and personal spite, and I don't think he's that spiteful, and I'm not sure he could convince the Wikimedia Foundation to do it. And by golly if I ever see a banner saying "Wikimedia needs your contribution to fund its continuing legal struggle against Citizendium" you can't expect much in the way of contributions from _me._