[Foundation-l] Dual-Licensing Wiktionary :fr ?

[Jerome Banal]

Hello,

We had a small chat at Wiktionary fr: since a few days about moving /new/
edits made on Wiktionary fr (and others some other are interested) to dual
licensing GFDL - CC-by. After a small discussion with Anthere about whether
we could be allowed to do it and how, she advised me to come and talk with
you all.

So maybe a little explanation of the reasons and consequences would be
useful.

The main reason we have in mind for discussing it is to have a better
cooperation with the project WiktionaryZ, which is dual-licensed as
specified above. It basically means that we can take its content under GFDL
license, but that they can take only contents that are under GFDL and CC-by
at the same time. Which is not our case.

Some people thinks that helping WiktionaryZ reusing our content would make
them progress faster, and in return, that their progresses would help us
making progress in the future in several possible ways (software part, data
part...).


What would be the consequences about this license modification ?

* A site license somewhat more complex. Edits prior to the date of change
would have to remain GFDL only (unless specific agreement with users), new
edits would be dual-licensed. This is not awful: people can still reuse the
whole Wiktionary as if it was GFDL-only. CC-by is just a bonus.

* As this is not a CC-by-SA (incompatible with WiktionaryZ), Wiktionary
content could be taken, possibly modified and redistributed under any
compatible licence with CC-by, which is about all as long as you give
attribution, including non-free licenses (but of course, the original
remains free so it should not be a big deal).

* Import from Wikipedia and other GFDL-only projects will not be possible
without prior agreement with past contributors. These imports are not
insignificant but remain limited in amount and often in quality.

* If we have to negotiate importing external source, we would have to
request dual-licensing, as WiktionaryZ needs to, right now. CC-by is more
free (I know, it's paradoxical; see it as "there are less restrictions,
including the one to keep derivative free") than GFDL so it may be more
difficult, as it is possible that the original authors can't get the
enhancements made by someone else back in their own work due to a different
license choice.


So there are good points (better collaborative work with WiktionaryZ) and
bad points (probably more difficult reusing of some external sources -like
some other GFDL dictionaries- which brought a good amount of articles in the
past and of derivative works).

OK, I think that's the picture. What do you think about it? Should
Wiktionary users start a poll on their projects? On Meta? Or does that just
sound bad to you?

Thanks all,
Jerome Banal