I'm not in disagreement with any of the sentiments expressed by Simon.

Two thoughts, though...

1. If we did decide to change the license, it would have to be to something with equivalent or at least similar credibility to the GNU license, which might be hard to achieve with something homegrown. One of the most important "marketing" reasons for the GNU license is that people can immediately see that it is a "GNU-brand" license and therefore something that they can trust in the usual ways.

2. It would probably be very difficult to change the license at this point, since any change we made would have to be consistent with the fact that the content in the encyclopedia is already GNU FDL, and the "viral" nature of GNU licenses means that derivatives have to have the same license.

I'm not even sure we could change from FDL to GPL.

It should be pointed out that the GPL isn't really appropriate, either. It was designed for software and it is really incoherent when you start reading it and thinking about things in a non-software context. There is talk of compiled binaries, etc., which only apply here by the very loosest of analogies.