[Foundation-l] Passed resolution (super short update)

[John at Darkstar]

As long as it does not GFDL it breaks the contract. A change of GFDL to
facilitate a swap with CC-by-sa is probably also illegitimate to the
users. The only legally binding solution is the hard way to start dual
licensing, let the users dual license old contributions and at some time
in the future (several years) drop GFDL when all old contributions are
fixed.

That said, cc-by-sa does not cover collaborative attributions and must
also be changed. This is a very central reason for the swap and cc-by-sa
does not solve it at all. GFDL says you can get away with crediting five
- 5 - contributors, cc-by-sa says you have to credit all contributors.

I think the best solution would be to branch GFDL at its present state,
and make a Gnu license specially tailored to the needs of collaborative
systems like Wikipedia. Don't start with a discussion about who is
behind which license scheme, start with a discussion about what are the
actual needs, how can it be achieved, and is the different options legal
in all jurisdictions.

In short, I don't think it was very wise to start this process without
having a plan how to fix the problems. To me it sounds like a quick fix
devised downtown very late in the evening. ;)

John E

Thomas Dalton skrev:
> On 15/12/2007, Titoxd @ Wikimedia <titoxd.wikimedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Maybe I'm a little bit late to the party, but I do have one question about a
>> potential migration.
>>
>> Currently, our contributions are released under the GFDL v1.2+. So, any
>> modifications by FSF to the license would not be problematic. However, even
>> if GFDL v1.3 said that its end users could migrate texts to CC-BY-SA, does
>> that mean we can? Since we agreed to give our contributions to Wikimedia
>> under the "GFDL", I'm concerned whether we may change licenses because we
>> agreed to use the GFDL in particular.
>>
>> Since that probably doesn't make much sense, let me rephrase it: In other
>> words, if GFDL v1.3 were a letter-by-letter copy of CC-BY-SA, there wouldn't
>> be any problems, definitely. But if we decided to switch from that
>> GFDL v1.3to the identical CC-BY-SA, would there be any problems
>> because we are not
>> using a license with the name "GNU Free Documentation License" anymore? Is
>> there any precedent for this occuring?
> 
> It's a technical detail that I'm sure the FSF will take into account.
> They would have to be extremely stupid to ignore such an obvious
> point. What say we wait until we've seen the license before picking
> holes in it?
> 
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