Jean-Christophe Chazalette wrote:
I strongly support the Wikimedia License idea. GDFL is not that appropriate to Wikis for plenty of reasons. I'll tell them when there'll be a real issue here :) Suffice it to say that considering what wiki actually is, technically, and what kind of ambition Wfoundation actually has, a tailor-made license would be just *better*. Of course, I would join any thinktank about this topic and even would accept to draft the main lines - with the help of a decent French-English translator ... of course. villy
While I support efforts to improve the GFDL and make it more compatible with other free licenses like some of those Creative Commons offers, I'm not that enthusiastic about the idea of developing a new Wikimedia-specific license. Both for our benefit in using material from other sources, and to maintain good relations with the rest of the free-content community, I think we should resist creating a new license unless we can clearly articulate the justification and benefits of creating yet another license.
Due to the nature of copyleft licenses, proliferating more of them only makes it harder to interchange content between them, even though they're supposed to be free. Ideally, I would like to have a system where you can just identify something generically as copyleft and people will understand what that means in the same way that they understand the basic principle of copyright today. But approaching that by reconciling different licensing systems is difficult, and this stage may be better achieved with the help of legislation.
--Michael Snow