[Foundation-l] A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

[Rowan Collins]

I'm not convinced relicensing existing project would be at all easy,
and I think there are more fundamental issues than what the ideal
license would be. I see 4 options:

1) work out a way of distributing the content in different ways but
still adhering precisely to the GFDL. For instance, am I right in
thinking that the GFDL doesn't actually require the *history*, only a
list of *authors*? If so, the list required becomes slightly less
unwieldy, as it is simply a long list of names (and/or pseudonyms);
there's not even any need to worry about who contributed to which
parts, or which imported version takes "precedence" - just shove all
the names in one big list and say "these are the authors".

2) find a way of interpretting the GFDL that allows us to relax some
of the contraints - in other words, a loop-hole in the copyleft
provision, which says that any derived work has to have all the same
constraints as the GFDL has. In this category comes an appropriately
compatible new version of the license, or some cunningly
compatible-but-different license developed by the Creative Commons.
This might allow the way the atrribution etc are presented to be
different, but it is unlikely to change what information has to be
included (i.e. I don't see that you could ever legally re-distribute a
GFDL text with no author information at all)

3) stick to the *spirit* of the GFDL, but don't enforce it fully and
hope no contributor does either; this is more-or-less what Wikipedia's
been doing for years, letting people run mirrors, copy information,
etc, with minimal attribution in the form of linking back to the
orginal version. Similarly, "transwiki-ing" content between projects
pays lip-service to giving attribution, but almost certainly doesn't
comply with the full license. Legally dodgy, but morally excusable if
done right.

4) convince everybody who has ever contributed to the projects in
question to re-license/dual license their contributions. Or, come up
with some way of only importing content that has never been touched by
someone who hasn't licensed their work in this way (you could include
a version of a page from *before* a non-dual-licenser editted, but
every version after they have done so would be a "derivative work" of
their version); how much information can be salvaged in such an
operation depends on how reachable contributors - particularly those
who made the *earliest* edits to content - are, and how successful the
campaign to get their agreement.

Of course, I may be completely wrong...

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]