On 12/07/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Can an individual organisation such as Wikimedia
change their
requirements, despite the license, to something more lenient as you
are suggesting? Even if they did, could some external
organisation/person have a problem with it? Could the Free Software
Foundation claim that we're misusing the GFDL? If they did, could they
demand we use a different license (I think not, but I'll ask anyway)?
Well, I'm just speculating, but they're questions that should be
considered.
Wikimedia can't change the license requirements to something more
lenient (a hypothetical soft-GFDL, or CC-BY, or something), because
only the copyright holder can relicense material they've released
under a given license.
And the copyright holders are the *authors*, not Wikimedia. Of course,
if the specific authors are willing to dual-license their work as
something else, you're sorted, and it may well be doable to manage
this for the bulk of the articles on a small wiki with only a few
active contributors... but it's a hack.
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk