Well, I think many people, including I, want to see GFDL changed and/or becoming compatible with CC-by-sa. The reason is just as you cited: We are stuck with it.

But such a change might take a long time (it has been already taking for a long time), while somewhat questionable practices (copying and pasting of texts or images without preserving history) are happening day by day. And that is where a quick temporary fix like the introduction of the PD license can help. Probably I was not clear on this, but it is not contradictory to the change to GFDL, (or drafting of GFCL) as I understand.

Also, if you are concerned about the importing of GFDL'd contents from outside sources, the PD license could specify that contents in the article, image, and media namespaces are not dual-licensed, but simply GFDL'd. But then, again, we are doing something questionable when we translate an article containing such a text from one language to another without preserving its history.

Like I suggested in the other email, it seems that the American Wikipedans are reasonably safe. Court may find, even in case a lawsuit happens for some reasons, not preserving history here and there is not a problem. And maybe other en. Wikipedians are as safe (or maybe not. That part is something I really don't know). So I am not urging that en. should adopt such a license.

But like I said, the license has its own benefits, both for en. wikipedians and potentially for others who copy contents (text or image) from en. without preserving history.

Regards,

Tomos

From: Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com To: foundation-l@Wikimedia.org CC: wiki_tomos@hotmail.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: w to properly use articles from an outside GFDL source? Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 12:56:27 -0700 (PDT)

--- Tomos at Wikipedia wiki_tomos@hotmail.com wrote on WikiEN-l:

...

Mav, you are right in that the effect is limited because we cannot retroactively apply the second license to past edits. But if we consider

the

...

effect, it seems it is still better to introduce it than not, and we

would

...

do just as Electicology suggested:

Sorry, it is simply not possible to create a derivative dual licensed work from a GFDL-only licensed article. Doing so would be a violation of the copyright of everyone who submitted the GFDL-only text. Dual licensing would also make it impossible to accept any new GFDL-only text.

We are stuck with the GFDL as is until the FSF makes changes to that license. Let's concentrate on improving the license we have - Jimmy has already stated that the FSF and CC people are interested in this type of thing.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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