2008/6/4 George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com>om>:
On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 6:19 PM, geni
<geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2008/6/4 George Herbert
<george.herbert(a)gmail.com>om>:
I don't think we've ever interpreted the
GFDL in the sense that the
author credits have to be invariant. Just accurate enough and
traceable enough. The GFDL doesn't require an absolute here...
I believe that you're inventing a problem where none exists...
It requires invariant. The GFDL is full of invariant sections both
accidental and deliberate. "Preserve the section Entitled "History""
"Preserve all the copyright notices " I really don't see a court going
for accepting the license meant accurate enough to be traceable.
But you are right no problem exists. If you want one name across all
projects just pick a unique name.
What it actually says:
# B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or
entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the
Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors
of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than
five), unless they release you from this requirement.
...
# I. Preserve the section Entitled "History", Preserve its Title, and
add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and
publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If there
is no section Entitled "History" in the Document, create one stating
the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on
its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as
stated in the previous sentence.
We don't exactly follow the as-written rule there because we can't -
the history page for an article is not a Title Page or a section
entitled "History", as it's a live wiki and not a paper document.
Yes there is. They are both the history section.
Further, the "Preserve" doesn't say
"Invariantly preserve", which
other things do explicitly.
"Invariantly preserve" does not appear at any point in the GFDL.
Usurpation is a special case of user account name
changes. A
voluntary name change violates the explicit interpretation you're
arguing of the license, too. We allow those...
No. We can argue that the person is re-releasing all their content
under a second name. The GFDL has no problems with this.
If an usurped account owner complains, along these
lines, our
counterargument is "We still list (your account / identity) in the
article history, though we've changed the displayed text string for
it. That's all we do for anyone, ever."
Nice try but the GFDL isn't interested in account / identities just
the text string.
In the enwiki BNB discussion Robert Rhode pointed to,
see the
following statement by Carl, which sums up what I think about this:
"As to whether it breaks GFDL to change someone's name, I think we can
fall back on the argument that when someone contributes to they
implicitly grant us permission to change things for the purpose of
administering the site (this is also the reason, I believe, that we
don't worry about other minor GFDL issues such as accidentally lost
attribution, etc.). If you feel renaming users against their will is
an issue, it would be more compelling to everyone if you could
convince Mike Godwin to comment on it, especially since other projects
appear to do so, and so if it's a GFDL violation they need to change
their practices. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:21, 20 May 2008 (UTC)"
I can't see the courts accepting it is necessary to mess with
attribution to administer the site.
The community should not be making trouble for
ourselves by trying to
worst-case interpret corner cases of the GFDL restrictions.
I'm not. The worse case stuff is far worse.
We've had
to interpret in a pragmantic manner. If there's a problem, bring it
to Mike, who can talk to the FSF folks or just interpret on his own
and let us know if there is legitimately a problem or if we're just
stressing ourselves out for the fun of it.
The pragmatic approach is that if you want to use a user name across
all sites is to chose something unique. If you want to argue that we
can get away with something fairly clearly against the GFDL I would
suggest it is incumbent on you to get support from the FSF or mike.
--
geni