On 5/1/05, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
My guess is that on the page near the beginning of the book where it gives copyright information, it should say "some portions of this book are (C) Wikipedia, and are released under the GNU Free Documentation licence" or something of the sort.
Will this be possible? If this was not text, but free software released under the GPL, the entire book would be have to be released under GPL. That's the "viral effect" of GPL, as intended by its creator Richard Stallman (and hated by Microsoft). Is there no such viral effect at all in GFDL?
Yes, there is a 'viral effect', but it can be circumvented by considering the book a compilation rather than a single work. This is not different with the GPL. The GPL says:
"In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License."
In written text it is much less clear what is an aggregation of separate works and what is a single derived work, and I would not mind people taking a broad view of 'aggregate works'. In my opinion, it should be possible to include a text derived from one or more Wikipedia articles as a chapter of a book, and consider only that chapter to be under the GFDL.
Andre Engels