[Foundation-l] GFDL 1.3 Release

Milos Rancic millosh at gmail.com
Mon Nov 3 22:23:41 UTC 2008


On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 10:50 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> * Later this month, we will post a re-licensing proposal for all
> Wikimedia wikis which are currently licensed under the GFDL. It will
> be collaboratively developed on meta.wiki and I will announce it here.
> This re-licensing proposal will include a simplified dual-licensing
> proposition, under which content will continue to be indefinitely
> available under GFDL, except for articles which include CC-BY-SA-only
> additions from external sources. (The terms of service, under this
> proposal, will be modified to require dual-licensing permission
> for any new changes.)
>
> It will be the obligation of re-users to validate whether an article
> includes CC-BY-SA-only changes -- dual licensing should not
> be a burden on editors. This is also not intended to be bidirectional,
> i.e., merging in GFDL-only text will not be possible.

The idea of dual licensing is great. However, CC-BY-SA-only additions
complicate situation a lot:
* Sites which adopts the same policy as Wikipedia would have
significant problems in detecting what is dual licensed and what is
CC-BY-SA-only.
* Sites which stay at GFDL (and a lot of wikis are GFDL just because
of Wikipedia compatibility; while it is fairly possible that they
wouldn't be able to switch from various reasons) would have much more
problems.
* Would any contributor be able to say "my contributions are licensed
just under CC-BY-SA"? (Out of incorporated external works.) If so,
this would make previous two possibilities practically impossible.
Then, it would be much more clear to license content just under
CC-BY-SA.



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