2008/11/3 Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com:
So if the community decides dual-licensing is dumb, is that the end of it? GFDL Forever?
Not necessarily - though it would certainly slow things down again. Generally these negotiations have been very slow, as you may have noticed.
I will note that the reason the FSF has conditionally asked us for dual licensing in the first place is that some Wikipedians have privately asked them to. These same Wikipedians would likely object to an alternative course of action without any dual licensing, and so it may put us in the exact same position with a different faction opposing a switch. Note how Milos expressed disapproval of even the compromise we've come up with, and suggested unrestricted dual-licensing for Wikipedia instead.
Again, it is my belief that the current proposal reflects a compromise of different views that also exist within the Wikipedia community, and unless there are any major bugs in it, it makes sense to me to adopt it. The biggest risk I see with the dual-licensing approach we're proposing is that it would allow people to take stuff under GFDL 1.3 only and repurpose it in ways in which we couldn't re-import it. They would, however, be bound under the more rigid conditions of the GFDL when doing so, so I think it's generally unlikely that this would happen. This is a problem we're aware of and that, in our view, is not sufficient reason to not implement the proposed compromise. If there are other problems, I would like to hear about them.