[Foundation-l] A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

[Rowan Collins]

On 19/05/05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> *What license would be best that is FREE and allows for the expanded use
> of the UW data

The best place to look at when working this out is probably the
Creative Commons [http://creativecommons.org/] - their mission [or one
part of it] is to codify a whole set of licences and present them in a
user-friendly way, so you can take your pick.

The closest equivalent to the GFDL is "Attribution-ShareAlike" (aka
"cc-by-sa") - see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/  How
well this would deal with the massive number of authors involved in
the whole database, I'm not sure, but I get the general impression
that it's slightly more flexible than the GFDL..

There used to also be an option to not require attribution at all, but
this was "phased out" "for simplicity" when they released "version
2.0" licenses (see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4216).
Broadly, "cc-sa 1.0" [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sa/1.0/]
says you can do what you like with the work as long as you let
everyone else do what they like with the result.

> *Do we need to have the consent of every editor before we can export to
> UW or is UW sufficiently different from Wiktionary to make it an
> original work in its own right or do we need this only when we change
> the license?

Massive disclaimer: I am no kind of expert, and someone may well say
I'm completely wrong on this; feel free to take their word over mine
as soon as that happens.

That said, I will say that I understand relicencing to be, legally,
very awkward indeed. Because the GFDL has exactly the kind of
"copyleft"/"share-alike"/"viral" stipulation - you have to keep the
content under similar terms however you manipulate it - anything which
uses the existing data *has to be* "compatible" with the GFDL.
Basically, all the people who've contributed to existing Wiktionaries
own the copyright on their contributions, and have given explicit
permission to license to them under the GFDL; they have *not* given
permission for anyone to use them under a *different* license.

Your idea of "almost complying" and offering people an avenue of
complaint is indeed a nice compromise - and as long as the way the
data is used is "in the right spirit", I doubt anyone but
trouble-makers *would* complain. [In fact, this is more-or-less what
happens at the moment with content that's moved or copied between
languages or projects; although, they're only moved, so far, between
projects with the same license] What the *legal* implications are, I'm
not sure - but then I think I'm right in saying that even the
tremendously popular GPL has never actually been tested in court, so
make of that what you will...

Switching to a license which didn't require attribution at all
probably isn't at all possible though, because contributors haven't
even broadly given "us" (or anyone) the right to use their
contributions without giving them credit. So as far as I can see the
best one can hope for is a simplified way of including the same
information (either by a loose reading of the GFDL, or a simpler
licence in similar spirit, which is the same thing).


One final comment - it's often mentionned in discussions on this topic
that the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons should be, and
are, working on making their licences (GFDL and cc-by-sa) legally
"compatible", so that works published under one can be used in works
published under the other. I've not heard of any concrete progress on
this, though, beyond "productive discussions", so don't hold your
breath, as the saying goes.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]