[Foundation-l] A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

[Jean-Baptiste Soufron]

Well, all of this is exactly what I am suggesting...


> 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]
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