[Foundation-l] GFDL 1.3 Release

[Robert Rohde]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 3:21 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 2008/11/3 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
>> What are the terms of the agreement? There are various ways of
>> implementing duel licensing and I would like to know which ones are
>> legit.
>
> [begin quote from Richard]
> * ALL contributors agree to the following:
>
>  Wikipedia can release their newly written text
>  under both GFDL and CC-BY-SA in parallel.
>  However, if they imported any external material
>  that's available under CC-BY-SA and not under GFDL,
>  Wikipedia is bound by that.
>
> * All old revisions are released under GFDL | CC-BY-SA.
>
> * All new revisions are released with this license statement:
>
>  This page is released under CC-BY-SA.
>  Depending on its editing history, it MAY also be available under
>  the GFDL; see [link] for how to determine that.
> [end quote from Richard]

The sometimes, sort of, dual licensing provisions be advocated here
strikes me as impractical.

As I understand it, and correct me if I am mistaken, the goal is to
dual license all existing content and all future content directly
created by Wikipedians.

However, in addition, authors would be allowed to incorporate
pre-existing CC-BY-SA content into Wikipedia articles, in which case
the resulting work would be marked CC-BY-SA-only from that point
forward.  Is that correct?

That appears to require that Wikipedians keep track of which content
is dual licensed and which is CC-BY-SA-only.  To really do this
correctly, people would have to check and flag licenses every time
text is moved from one article to another.  Initially it would be easy
since there would be little SA-only content, but eventually it would
grow to be a common issue.  In rare cases, SA-only templates could
contaminate many articles at once (not that we do a good job with
template attribution to begin with).  Do portals and other pages
become SA-only when they excerpt from SA-only articles, etc.?  Lots of
opportunities for messing interactions.

Doing a good job for reusers would also mean having licensing
incompatibilities flagged in an obvious way.  Probably this needs to
integrated into Mediawiki to change the copyright notices on a per
article basis as necessary.

Most people ignore licensing issues, and so I'm sure any SA-only issue
will likely get ignored as well.  Either people will treat everything
as dual, or they will treat everything as SA-only.  Probably that's
okay 99.9% of the time, but it still feels like we are being set up
with a system that we are unlikely to ever manage well.

If there were a choice available, I'd prefer that all text have the
same license (or set of licenses) rather than saddle ourselves with a
system that requires internal tracking.

-Robert Rohde