--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)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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