As long as it does not GFDL it breaks the contract. A change of GFDL to facilitate a swap with CC-by-sa is probably also illegitimate to the users. The only legally binding solution is the hard way to start dual licensing, let the users dual license old contributions and at some time in the future (several years) drop GFDL when all old contributions are fixed.
That said, cc-by-sa does not cover collaborative attributions and must also be changed. This is a very central reason for the swap and cc-by-sa does not solve it at all. GFDL says you can get away with crediting five - 5 - contributors, cc-by-sa says you have to credit all contributors.
I think the best solution would be to branch GFDL at its present state, and make a Gnu license specially tailored to the needs of collaborative systems like Wikipedia. Don't start with a discussion about who is behind which license scheme, start with a discussion about what are the actual needs, how can it be achieved, and is the different options legal in all jurisdictions.
In short, I don't think it was very wise to start this process without having a plan how to fix the problems. To me it sounds like a quick fix devised downtown very late in the evening. ;)
John E
Thomas Dalton skrev:
On 15/12/2007, Titoxd @ Wikimedia titoxd.wikimedia@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe I'm a little bit late to the party, but I do have one question about a potential migration.
Currently, our contributions are released under the GFDL v1.2+. So, any modifications by FSF to the license would not be problematic. However, even if GFDL v1.3 said that its end users could migrate texts to CC-BY-SA, does that mean we can? Since we agreed to give our contributions to Wikimedia under the "GFDL", I'm concerned whether we may change licenses because we agreed to use the GFDL in particular.
Since that probably doesn't make much sense, let me rephrase it: In other words, if GFDL v1.3 were a letter-by-letter copy of CC-BY-SA, there wouldn't be any problems, definitely. But if we decided to switch from that GFDL v1.3to the identical CC-BY-SA, would there be any problems because we are not using a license with the name "GNU Free Documentation License" anymore? Is there any precedent for this occuring?
It's a technical detail that I'm sure the FSF will take into account. They would have to be extremely stupid to ignore such an obvious point. What say we wait until we've seen the license before picking holes in it?
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