On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:38 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen < cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
Robert Rohde wrote:
If someone comes to us and says: "I want to print a copy of [[France]] in my book. What is a reasonable way to comply with the license?", then we really ought to be able to answer that question. If we can't agree on an acceptable answer to that question under CC-BY-SA, then we probably shouldn't be considering adopting it.
Again I have to record dissent. Do keep in mind that under what we are escaping from under, not even the guardians of that license were able to answer that question. So staying under GFDL is not a real way to dodge the issue.
The GFDL has problems which need to be fixed. If the "relicensing" under CC-BY-SA occurs, that's much less likely to happen.
Now on the gripping hand, if the real problem you have
here is the fear that some time later, after the migration the foundation were to unilaterally express an interpretation of allowable "reasonable" forms of attribution, I would have to regretfully admit that given past form (and sadly, opinions expressed by some influential people in the foundation staff) that is not unfathomable.
And then there's that, which is by far my biggest problem with this switch.
I'd much rather see a switch to the GSFDL, with some sort of clause added to that license allowing combining of history lines into a single line listing all significant authors, in the case of an MMORPG (or whatever it is the FSF has chosen for the codeword for Wikipedia).
The only thing I can offer is that
that would of course be a new ball game, and the same people waving whiffle-bats around, would be involved there and then, again. I not only think possible, but am reassured that a bad result could not stand, for long. Please trust the good sense of the community being able to countermand the understandable errors of the foundations operatives.
Rushing to a premature decision is exactly the problem that provided the GFDL in the first place. I see no reason not to take the time to do things right. Even if the August 1, 2009 deadline can't be reached (and I see no reason for this), it can always be extended via a GFDL 1.4. (Or even better, GFDL 2.0 whose draft already contains a GSFDL clause.)