In this letter, I will answer some specific technical questions about
the license to the best of my ability. But in a separate letter I
will answer the bigger picture question, and convince Simon that the
attribution requirement is a good thing.
Simon Kissane wrote:
I don't like that idea, and having read the GNU
FDL,
have come to the conclusion that the requirement is
most likely in violation of the terms of the license.
Most certainly not. I asked RMS specifically about this issue before
we adopted the GNU FDL for Nupedia and Wikipedia.
The rule is that the invariant section can contain anything as long as
it is not the subject matter of the article. In particular, the
invariant section can contain HTML code for linking back to the
article.
The FDL permits the inclusion of invariant sections,
but it makes clear that these are front cover sections
or appendices, i.e. separate sections at the beginning
or end of a work, not something to be included on
every page.
Each individual article in Wikipedia is released under the FDL.
They are completely separable by potential users.
It also implies that each of these
sections is to have a unique title -- are we to give
each link table a unique name? It also implies clearly
that the invariant sections are in the original copy
of the document -- which the table links aren't in the
original copy (
www.wikipedia.com).
This is obviously a minor technical issue which can be fixed in 5
seconds.
Finally, requiring them to be in HTML seems to be
violative of the FDL as well. What if I wanted to do
my website in some other markup language, such as
XHTML or SGML or XML or WML or (insert some not yet
invented language here) instead? Then I can't
technically include the exact HTML, which seems to
amount to a requirement that any redistribution on a
website be in HTML. Additional restrictions over and
above those in the FDL are prohibited by the FDL.
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.
There is no violation of the license to require that the invariant
section be rendered exactly, no matter what the contents.
Now of course, any of these terms could be added if
some one individual owned the content to Wikipedia,
but they don't. The contributors license it everyone
else under the terms of the FDL; attempting to
redistribute it under any additional restriction
contrary to the FDL is in violation of their
copyright, unless you get their consent, which would
mean the consent of every single contributor to
Wikipedia.
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.
I understand that all people want to do is require
acknowledgement, all I am saying is that legal means
must be chosen to carry this out. The legal means are
those permitted by the FDL, which is by placing a
statement (and a URL) as front-cover matter,
back-cover matter, or in an invariant section.
Websites copying Wikipedia are required to include
these sections, but these are separate sections, not
notices on every single page.
They are separate sections, on every single page.
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