On Thu, 8 Feb 2007, Andre Engels wrote:
2007/2/8, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>om>:
If they are releasing under and ND license, it
may even be because we
already talked to them and failed to help them understand that a basic
strong copyleft licenses will take care of most of the things that
they really care about, such as preventing the fraud of someone making
new versions and blaming them on the original author.. Whenever we see
ND (and NC alike) we are seeing evidence of our own failure to
advocate truly free licenses.
If every ND license is such a failure, we are truly in a horrible state,
because the text of the GFDL itself is under an ND license, and thus we are
not allowed to put it on a Wikipedia page, except for the fact that we
must....
This has always been a basic problem with the license.
Neroden puts it well in a comment on the GSFDL draft:
'As usual, this is a "non-free license text". Really, the license text
needs to have a free license. Since some degree of license proliferation
is unavoidable, we want people to reuse good clauses rather than inventing
their own.
Since you don't want to encourage license proliferation or confuse
people, it's OK to grant the permission to make derivative works of the
license text somewhere less prominent, such as on your website. But it
really ought to be done somewhere.'
SJ