Andrew Whitworth wrote:
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.
I agree with this point entirely. The average contributor couldn't
care less about the license, and it's my experience that licensing in
general has done more to hinder contributions then it has to secure
them. Or, at the very least, the hindrances are more apparent then the
securities are.
Besides a few GFDL ideologists, most contributors wouldn't care at all
if we switched licenses, and many would welcome the freedom of a less
restrictive licensing scheme. This is certainly the case on wikibooks
where many book donations have been slowed or even canceled because of
licensing problems. I would venture to guess that most of the problems
associated with such a license switch would come externally, not
internally.
--Andrew Whitworth
This may be generally true, but it only takes one who pushes hard for
keeping the GFDL to "upset the apple cart" if you want to push for a
license change.
BTW, you can count me in an a GFDL ideologist if you want, and my
contributions are under the terms of the GFDL.... and I intend to
enforce that license on anything I've contributed to Wikimedia projects
where the GFDL is the explicit default license of the project.
And yes, I've checked for copyright violations of my individual
contributions. There have been a few, but it generally hasn't been that
big of a problem, nor have I seen any of my contributions used in
generally a fashion I wouldn't agree with in the first place. The worst
situations were for-profit websites that took Wikimedia content (both
Wikipedia and Wikibooks) and simply wrapped advertisements around the
content.... and ignored the GFDL. But then again, those websites
generally got so little web traffic that most of them fold up after less
than a year of operation. Those violations are also watched by many
other individuals, so I'm not overly protective. But I would object to
somebody taking my contributions to Wikibooks and Wikipedia, and
relicensing them to something other than the GFDL...particularly if it
was the WMF who did this to my contributions. I expect better out of
the WMF.
-- Robert Horning