[Foundation-l] A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

[Erik Moeller]

Jean-Baptiste Soufron:
> Hello,
> 
> changing the license of a running project is difficult, but not that  
> much. Just think that it will take some time but it will avoid all  the 
> present problems we have on WP.

I agree. I would, however, caution against moving too quickly. First, as 
Jean-Baptiste says, it may be desirable to have a license which is under 
our own control to develop (put it on a wiki ;-). Second, the license 
which is the most suitable for wikis, CC-WIKI
	http://creativecommons.org/drafts/wiki_0.5
is currently still a draft.

One key advantage of CC-WIKI over CC-BY-SA is that it does not require 
attribution to any particular person, but to the wiki community (a 
designated entity). I'm not sure how compatible this is with EU moral 
rights law, though. CC-BY-SA/CC-BY, on the other hand, require 
attribution to the "original author" only. This, too, might be a problem 
with moral rights, and it's certainly not very wiki-like to just 
attribute the first person making an edit.

I believe that Jimmy is in talks with the Creative Commons people about 
CC-WIKI. There have also been some attempts to make CC-BY-SA and GFDL 
compatible to one another. The latter would be desirable for Wikipedia.

For our other projects, I think the most reasonable course of action is 
to try to find some agreement between Creative Commons and Wikimedia 
that lets us steer the development of CC-WIKI, but CC would provide the 
legal review to bring it in line with national laws. The license would 
still be a Creative Commons license.

After we have a suitable license, we can make an effort to get agreement 
from the signed in Wiktionary contributors to dual-license their content.

All best,

Erik