[Foundation-l] GFDL 1.3 Release

[Erik Moeller]

2008/11/3 Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com>:
> So if the community decides dual-licensing is dumb, is that the end of
> it?  GFDL Forever?

Not necessarily - though it would certainly slow things down again.
Generally these negotiations have been very slow, as you may have
noticed.

I will note that the reason the FSF has conditionally asked us for
dual licensing in the first place is that some Wikipedians have
privately asked them to. These same Wikipedians would likely object to
an alternative course of action without any dual licensing, and so it
may put us in the exact same position with a different faction
opposing a switch. Note how Milos expressed disapproval of even the
compromise we've come up with, and suggested unrestricted
dual-licensing for Wikipedia instead.

Again, it is my belief that the current proposal reflects a compromise
of different views that also exist within the Wikipedia community, and
unless there are any major bugs in it, it makes sense to me to adopt
it. The biggest risk I see with the dual-licensing approach we're
proposing is that it would allow people to take stuff under GFDL 1.3
only and repurpose it in ways in which we couldn't re-import it. They
would, however, be bound under the more rigid conditions of the GFDL
when doing so, so I think it's generally unlikely that this would
happen. This is a problem we're aware of and that, in our view, is not
sufficient reason to not implement the proposed compromise. If there
are other problems, I would like to hear about them.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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