Erik Moeller wrote:
On 8/15/06, Amgine <amgine(a)saewyc.net>
wrote:
"I now understand why the GFDL is a bad
license." Eben Moglen,
Wikimania 2006
Which doesn't mean that it cannot be improved. There's a real effort
underway to do so.
I'm not sure GFDL is the best license for Wikiversity. It depends on
the amount of content mixing with other projects that is desired. I
suspect that imports from other projects will be likely to create
educational materials of different kinds, such as instructional
devices embedding Wikipedia articles. From that perspective, the
compatibility advantage of GFDL could be a compelling argument.
I do agree that the Wikiversity community should discuss the issue, in
a similar way it was discussed on Wikinews after the project was set
up.
Erik
I will say that by its nature Wikiversity is going to be mixing content
from all of the Wikimedia projects (including presumably Wikinews as
well at some point). In this regard, I would suspect that Wikiversity
should remain GFDL for this reason alone.
The other huge issue is that most of the Wikiversity content was started
on Wikibooks under the GFDL, and by abandoning the GFDL it is also
abandoning all of the effort that went into Wikiversity on Wikibooks.
That is a considerable amount of content and not something to be
discarded lightly. This isn't like Wikinews that didn't have
substantial content already developed prior to its creation.
This is, however, one reason why I think the license issue on the
incubator ought to be discussed, as going from the GFDL to another
license can't be done. At the very least the incubator ought to be
dual-licensed or have some more thought put into it in that regard.
--
Robert Scott Horning
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I think that the number of contributors to content of Wikiversity is low
enough that a large portion of it may be able to be released under another
license. All doing that requires is getting affirmative assent of all the
contributors to a page / article / book / whatever that they are ok with a
new license.
The time to start doing that is now, however. And the question of what
other license to use is a good one... if one hasn't been selected soon, it
will be practically too late.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com