At 12:52 PM 8/10/2008, Thomas Dalton wrote:

...

1. I thought that the GFDL was already compatible with CC-BY-SA 3.0,

since they both required derivative works to be published under the same license. Is there a specific part where they're incompatible, or is it just a case that there are ambiguities about compatibility, and the FDL will be revised to remove all doubt?

Indeed, they require both require new versions to be under the same license as the original, and GFDL isn't the same as CC-BY-SA 3.0, thus they are incompatible. In spirit, they're pretty similar, but they have to exactly the same license (up to version numbers, at least) for them to be interchangeable.

Thanks. So just to be clear, does that mean it's still technically illegal to copy an article from Wikipedia and republish it under CC-BY-SA? But once an FDL version is released that's compatible with CC-BY-SA, it'll no longer be illegal?

(So, for people to start copying Wikipedia content to Knol, presumably two things would have to happen -- Knol would have to allow CC-BY-SA as a publishing option, and FDL would have to be revised to be CC-BY-SA-compatible.)

Since it was announced in December 2007 that they planned to make the FDL compatible with CC-BY-SA, does that mean they're still working on it? Are their pro bono lawyers just really careful with things like this, so they usually take a long time before coming out with a new version of FDL that meets a specific goal?

-Bennett

bennett@peacefire.org http://www.peacefire.org (425) 497 9002