Thomas Dalton writes:
> It only takes one for it to be immoral to take advantage of their
> ignorance. "Don't be evil" and all that.
and
> It's that last sentence which concerns me. There is a difference
> between something being illegal, and it getting you sent to jail or
> sued. I, for one, am not comfortable with relying on people's apathy
> to get away with breaking the law, however safe it may be.
If you're saying there's such a thing as being "illegal" but not
resulting potentially in a criminal or civil penalty, then you're
using "illegal" in a way that it is not normally used.
As for "immoral," Thomas also writes:
> The fact that
> Mike is suggesting we would need to give people the option of opting
> out implies there is a legal issue involved in invoking the clause.
I am primarily suggesting the opt-out option because I believe it's
the moral thing to do. The fact is, I don't think there's much legal
risk associated with even the most high-handed implementation of the
migration, but I expect us not to be high-handed and instead to
accommodate all reasonable complaints from contributors, up to and
including removal of identifiable content they've generated under
older GFDL expectations.
(So far as the question of whether French and German users would no
longer be able to reuse Wikipedia content, I cannot imagine how a
license migration of the sort we're talking about here -- a
harmonization of GFDL and CC-BY-SA -- could possibly lead to such a
result. The endpoint license would unquestionably allow for reuse in
France or Germany or anywhere else.)
--Mike (still trying not to be evil)
