On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 10:50 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)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.