[Foundation-l] GFDL and relicensing

[Andrew Gray]

On 23/11/2007, Robert Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:


> I suppose I have.  What has been suggested here by Mike and Andrew was
> not a modification of the GFDL to an updated version, but suggesting
> that some sort of community vote could happen here that would simply
> ignore that the GFDL even exists, and simply replacing the default
> license on all Wikimedia projects to something like CC-by-SA.

That was discussed... as a thought experiment, mainly to demonstrate
what an awfully bad idea it was!

Quick recap of how this discussion came about -

* Side note about Citizendium
* By the way, CZ is faffing over their license, they might pick -NC or
something.
* Noodling about CZ reusing WP content, or WP folding back in CZ
derivative content
* Hey, Wikipedia's nonprofit, couldn't we theoretically use NC material?
* Yes, in theory, in practice no - the GFDL means we'd have to get all
our content relicensed and we can't do that - we're "doomed by inertia
to remain GFDL"
* Technically, you know, we could sort of incrementally relicense to
something indistinguishable from CC-BY-SA.
* [everyone gets a bit lost]

The problem is that at each iteration the topic slipped a bit to the
side, and it was rather easy to assume that at the last stage, someone
was actually recommending declaring we were relicensing to CC-BY-NC or
something equally unlikely!

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk