[Foundation-l] GFDL and relicensing

[Matthew Britton]

Allowing people to "opt out" like this simply isn't
possible.

Quite apart from the fact that old revisions would remain
in the page history, how exactly would they do it? Undo any
edits of theirs they didn't want to relicense? Anyone with
a substantial number of edits who tried that would be
blocked pretty quickly.

I imagine most people who have been contributing for any
length of time share my view that our contributions are
effectively public domain and, regardless of what I, the
Foundation or indeed anyone else does, have been and will
be used in many different ways without the slightest bit of
respect for the GFDL or any other license.

-Gurch

--- Mike Godwin <mnemonic at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On Nov 21, 2007, at 7:00 AM,
> foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org  
> wrote:
> 
> > Wikipedia itself is doomed by inertia to remain GFDL.
> WMF
> > doesn't hold any of the rights and thus doesn't have
> the power to deem
> > things relicensed; you'd need the copyright holders to
> do that.
> 
> I don't think the problem is quite as intractable as all
> that,  
> although I will grant it is a tricky problem. In my
> (possibly  
> misinformed) view, FSF is the custodian of the meaning
> and terms of  
> the GFDL, which allows for migration to later versions of
> GFDL, which  
> creates the possibility of an approved GFDL that is
> essentially an  
> equivalent to an updated CC-BY-SA license.  FSF is
> currently in dialog  
> with Creative Commons about harmonizing GFDL with
> CC-BY-SA.
> 
> WMF doesn't have to "deem things relicensed." Instead, it
> could say,  
> with full notice to the community, and after plenty of
> public  
> discussion, that its view is that the content in
> Wikipedia should  
> migrate to the harmonized GFDL/CC-BY-SA license (version
> 3.x for both,  
> most likely), and offer community members plenty of
> latitude to opt  
> out by removing content (I'd be inclined to give GFDL
> licensors that  
> option indefinitely).  We might lose some content that
> way, but I  
> personally doubt we'd lose much. So I don't think we're
> stuck with the  
> awful choice of having to stick with GFDL or start a new
> project.
> 
> 
> --Mike
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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