--- Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu wrote:
No, ''that'' doesn't decrease the freedom of the document -- it's other effects of the copyleft that do so.
I'll give a specific (albeit still hypothetical) example:
Suppose that there are two free documents that I like, one of which uses the GNU FDL licence, one of which uses CC-by-sa. I want to combine these two free documents into a single modified one. Even though both of them are supposed to be free, I can't do this! But if either of these documents uses the noncopyleft CC-by instead, then I am able to do what I want to do with the documents. The CC-by licence is more free; it gives me more freedoms.
Yes, but that deals with the freedom of your use, not the freedom of the content since the CC-by text could just as easily be made into a proprietary derivative work while the FDL and CC-by/sa text can only ever be libre (at least until their copyright expires, which if Disney has its say will be never). Fixing the compatibility issue is a major problem that must be corrected, however.
Correcting that is my plan A since it has the largest payoff in the end (a world in which the best representation of knowledge is not controllable). Using a license of convenience in the interim would be a bad idea since works under that license will not be copyleft, thus making derivative works of them susceptible to proprietary control.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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