Mike Godwin wrote:
Newyorkbrad writes:
I'm also curious how the problem can run in
both directions. I can
understand that one license would be more restrictive than the
other, such
that material from project A couldn't be freely used in project B.
But the
nuances of the license requirements must be subtle indeed if the
incompatability runs both ways. Not being a license terms
aficionado, I'd
appreciate a layman's explanation of the issues.
Keep in mind that this is unexplored territory even for me, but I can
give you my impressions of the problems I see with the three licensing
options Knol offers.
1) With regard to CC-BY:
It's not a question of one license's being more restrictive than the
other, exactly. It's that the Share Alike (SA) requirement, which
makes the content truly copyleft, can't be added or subtracted in any
straightforward way that I can see. (Note that for purposes of
simplicity I am lumping together GFDL -- Wikipedia's current licensing
standard -- and CC-BY-SA. Their requirements are substantively mostly
the same although formally different.)
How could you add SA, for example, without being the original
licensor, for importing to Wikipedia? How could you subtract it
without being the original licensor(s), for importing to Knol?
Perhaps I am being just too dense, but my answer
would be _not_ "without being the original licensor(s)".
That is, by *being* the original licensor, or by obtaining
their explicit permission.
I am not clear that CC-BY constitutes an explicit
permission to use in Wikipedias current fashion,
since I am not either a copyleft specialist, but I
could imagine some would so argue.
We have, as far as I know, no problem accepting
contributions from people who live in countries
which acknowledge "moral rights", such as my
own (Finland), and which are thus fundamentally
*more* restrictive than CC-BY as a baseline in a
form that makes is so that PD does not really
exist in those countires at all.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen