--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
[snip]
Each individual article in Wikipedia is released under the FDL. They are completely separable by potential users.
But section 6 of the license reads "You may combine the Document with other documents released under this License, under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified versions, provided that you include in the combination all of the Invariant Sections of all of the original documents, unmodified, and list them all as Invariant Sections of your combined work in its license notice. The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single copy."
Therefore even if you release each Wikipedia article individually under the FDL, someone can combine them all, and delete all but one of the Wikipedia linking tables, since they would fall under "multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single copy." And then they can split that one work over multiple pages, treating the pages not as separate documents, but as mere subdivisions of a single document. So ultimately section 6 permits the evasion of your requirement, and allows the inclusion of only a single linkback, not even on the same page as the Wikipedia article, so long as they are all linked together to form a single document. Which is roughly what I would propose instead.
[snip]
But additional *permissions* are not prohibited. What we do is require the HTML if you are publishing
in *any* medium, but give you an extra *permission* to render it INSTEAD as plain text, XML, SGML, or whatever is appropriate in a particular medium.
Require the HTML if you are publishing in any medium? But give you permission to render it in another medium? So what then are we requiring -- the HTML code, or what the HTML code renders? And if only what the HTML code renders, how accurate a rendition is necessary?
There is no violation of the license to require that the invariant section be rendered exactly, no matter
what the contents.
Well, I think the license implies that "rendered exactly" refers primarily to identical text. Otherwise, if you wanted to include images or fonts or tables, I couldn't redistribute the document in plain text. And, considering the object and purpose of the FDL, it seems clear that such a restriction, prohibiting distribution in certain media, is contrary to the license. As I interpret it, the FDL requires redistribution of the identical text, but not the same presentation or machine encoding of the text.
[snip]
This is a deep misunderstanding. Any redistributor can add invariant sections. We add ours. You are free to distribute your own writings without the invariant sections if you like.
Yes, but only insofar as the invariant sections comply with the FDL definition of an invariant section. Which as I said I doubt your invariant sections do. But anyway, as I pointed out above, even if they are valid invariant sections, you still can't impose a requirement for them to occur on every single page, if multiple Wikipedia pages are reproduced.
[snip]
Simon
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