Allowing people to "opt out" like this simply isn't
possible.
Quite apart from the fact that old revisions would remain
in the page history, how exactly would they do it? Undo any
edits of theirs they didn't want to relicense? Anyone with
a substantial number of edits who tried that would be
blocked pretty quickly.
I imagine most people who have been contributing for any
length of time share my view that our contributions are
effectively public domain and, regardless of what I, the
Foundation or indeed anyone else does, have been and will
be used in many different ways without the slightest bit of
respect for the GFDL or any other license.
-Gurch
--- Mike Godwin <mnemonic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Nov 21, 2007, at 7:00 AM,
foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
wrote:
Wikipedia itself is doomed by inertia to remain
GFDL.
WMF
doesn't hold any of the rights and thus
doesn't have
the power to deem
things relicensed; you'd need the copyright
holders to
do that.
I don't think the problem is quite as intractable as all
that,
although I will grant it is a tricky problem. In my
(possibly
misinformed) view, FSF is the custodian of the meaning
and terms of
the GFDL, which allows for migration to later versions of
GFDL, which
creates the possibility of an approved GFDL that is
essentially an
equivalent to an updated CC-BY-SA license. FSF is
currently in dialog
with Creative Commons about harmonizing GFDL with
CC-BY-SA.
WMF doesn't have to "deem things relicensed." Instead, it
could say,
with full notice to the community, and after plenty of
public
discussion, that its view is that the content in
Wikipedia should
migrate to the harmonized GFDL/CC-BY-SA license (version
3.x for both,
most likely), and offer community members plenty of
latitude to opt
out by removing content (I'd be inclined to give GFDL
licensors that
option indefinitely). We might lose some content that
way, but I
personally doubt we'd lose much. So I don't think we're
stuck with the
awful choice of having to stick with GFDL or start a new
project.
--Mike
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