On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 10:50 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
- Later this month, we will post a re-licensing proposal for all
Wikimedia wikis which are currently licensed under the GFDL. It will be collaboratively developed on meta.wiki and I will announce it here. This re-licensing proposal will include a simplified dual-licensing proposition, under which content will continue to be indefinitely available under GFDL, except for articles which include CC-BY-SA-only additions from external sources. (The terms of service, under this proposal, will be modified to require dual-licensing permission for any new changes.)
It will be the obligation of re-users to validate whether an article includes CC-BY-SA-only changes -- dual licensing should not be a burden on editors. This is also not intended to be bidirectional, i.e., merging in GFDL-only text will not be possible.
The idea of dual licensing is great. However, CC-BY-SA-only additions complicate situation a lot: * Sites which adopts the same policy as Wikipedia would have significant problems in detecting what is dual licensed and what is CC-BY-SA-only. * Sites which stay at GFDL (and a lot of wikis are GFDL just because of Wikipedia compatibility; while it is fairly possible that they wouldn't be able to switch from various reasons) would have much more problems. * Would any contributor be able to say "my contributions are licensed just under CC-BY-SA"? (Out of incorporated external works.) If so, this would make previous two possibilities practically impossible. Then, it would be much more clear to license content just under CC-BY-SA.