Michael Snow wrote:
Marco Chiesa wrote:
Commons accepts materials that are free according to http://freedomdefined.org/Definition GFDL works fall within that definition, so they're free. We have lived eight years with GFDL and we've called Wikipedia the free encyclopedia all the time, so we cannot just dismiss GFDL now only because we've found a license that works better for us. The interincompatibility is probably the worst feature of copyleft, but we've lived long time with that and there's no reason to stop doing it.
In terms of our policy, I agree with this. That being said, for anyone deciding what license to choose when contributing to Wikimedia Commons - I cannot fathom why you would limit media to being released only under the GFDL unless it was designed specifically for incorporation into a GFDL work. It's a documentation license, not a media license, and when applied to radically different contexts it will still be free in the dogmatic sense, but it may no longer be all that useful.
While I completely agree with you, the situation is somewhat different if you are downloading a work that has been previously published under GFDL. Then the decision is not whether to choose the GFDL license, but the decision is whether to download.
I suggest the decision should be to download.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen