On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 6:00 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Ditching the GFDL in favour of a licence that's actually possible to keep to in practice is one of the best ideas ever.
You haven't ditched the GFDL though. In fact, the success of your "relicensing" relies on the claim that you're following it.
Furthermore, you haven't shown that CC-BY-SA is any more "possible to keep to in practice". CC-BY-SA's history section is even more onerous than the GFDL's. Not only do you have to keep track of prior versions, but you have to identify the changes as well.
Sure, you can handwave around it and claim that the authors have implicitly waived these conditions (perhaps through a terms of service), but that's no better than the GFDL situation.
This "move" hasn't made anything better, it has only made things worse. The one good thing it has done is that it has made it much more obvious to everyone that anything contributed to a Wikimedia project is, essentially and de facto, public domain (with maybe a twinge of copyleft, though it's hard to see how even that can be enforced).