On 5/1/05, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)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