[Foundation-l] Let's switch to CC-BY-SA

Delirium delirium at hackish.org
Tue Sep 11 16:07:19 UTC 2007


Andre Engels wrote:
> 2007/9/11, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
>
>   
>> It all boils down to "the spirit of the license". As long as we don't
>> violate the spirit of the license (which we don't), we should be fine.
>> If not legally, then at least morally.
>>     
>
> I don't agree. Either we keep to the license, or we don't. If we
> don't, then we don't have a moral right to force others to keep to the
> license either. And then we would do better to switch to CC-BY-SA, or
> to write our own license that does state what we really want others
> and ourselves to do.
>
> If we have the right to publish things under the GFDL as if they were
> licensed under CC-BY-SA, then we cannot deny others the right to
> republish them under CC-BY-SA either.
>   
But if we have the right to change the license to cc-by-sa, then others 
have the right to change the license to whatever they would prefer also, 
perhaps proprietary, or perhaps BSD, or perhaps the GPL. Wikipedia does 
not own the copyrights, so has no privileged position in that matter.

There's a big difference between a mess where a complex license has 
terms that are difficult to satisfy, and explicitly and willfully 
violating copyright by lying about the licensing of a work, claiming it 
is licensed under a license that the author never agreed to.

-Mark




More information about the foundation-l mailing list