[Foundation-l] Re: A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

[Jean-Baptiste Soufron]

> Thank you, that was quite interesting to read through - if there  
> are other similar cases, I'd love to hear about them.

There are some but Mozilla is one of the biggest one. Actually, I  
just studied FLOSS licenses evolution and I really think it is a  
feasible thing.

> One significant obstacle, of course, is that we have a lot of  
> anonymous editors where it's effectively impossible to trace the  
> person who holds the copyright (as opposed to the computer from  
> which they made the contribution). I'm guessing that Mozilla didn't  
> have this problem. We probably also have a much larger volume of  
> people who are not contactable via email, since we don't require an  
> email address in order to sign up for an account.

The good solution is a well done tagging job... And time.

>
> And while I don't know how many people have actually contributed  
> code to Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different level in  
> terms of sheer numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that the  
> relicensing process would not scale very well, shall we say.

I think it would, but is it a priority today ?

>
> The possibility of rewriting content we're unable to relicense is  
> interesting to consider. It strikes me that one potential use for  
> Magnus Manske's article validation tool would be to flag revisions  
> when an article has been rewritten so as to remove the content that  
> we can't secure permission to relicense. But anyway, if people are  
> serious about actually relicensing, the longer they wait, the  
> harder it will be.

Then we should prepare something around it.