[Foundation-l] Citizendium lizense

[Anthony]

On Nov 22, 2007 7:09 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 22/11/2007, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> > Actually, no. They could retain those articles under GFDL. But have all
> > others which did not contain text from Wikipedia under some other license.
> > Consider copyright from the perspective of each article.
>
> Yes, that certainly seems to be their intention. It's going to really
> complicate matters though. GFDL being viral means that any article
> containing a single sentence from a GFDL article (give or take fair
> use, I guess) must be entirely under GFDL, so if they start moving
> articles around and merging them, they're going to end up with a large
> portion of the site under GFDL.

If they go with a non-GFDL license for non-Wikipedia content, they
should probably eliminate the Wikipedia-based articles completely.
It's relatively minor to rewrite the article in your own words if
you're going to go through and fact-check everything anyway.  Using a
two-step process where one person extracts the facts (after checking
the sources) and then a second person writes the article from those
facts would probably be even easier.  In that sense going with a
non-GFDL license could actually be an advantage, as it'd encourage
people to do more than just copy/paste.  (*)

Of course, I think that non-GFDL license should actually be a free
[TM] one :).  I'm one of those ones who has significantly cut down on
contributions to Citizendium after hearing rumblings about the license
possibly not being a free [TM] one.

(*) I guess it could be said that this process could in itself violate
copyright on the collection of facts, but realistically if you're
porting to another free [TM] license and you acknowledge Wikipedia as
a source I don't think anyone would even try to sue, let alone win a
lawsuit.

(**) I use [TM] next to free because another one of Larry's
"eccentricities" is that he insists that an NC license is a free
license.  I think it's obvious what I mean by free, but in case you're
not sure, see http://freedomdefined.org/, that's essentially my use of
the term.