[Foundation-l] GFDL 1.3 Release

[Delirium]

Robert Rohde wrote:
> 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.
>   

The FAQ seems to say we explicitly will not be doing any of this license 
tracking:
"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."

In practice, that means that everything will probably need to be treated 
as SA-only, unless a reuser wants to validate for themselves that they 
can legitimately use it under the GFDL. I personally see that as a 
feature, but your mileage may vary. =] In particular, having significant 
amounts of content dual-licensed makes it exceedingly easy for reusers 
to poison-pill their derived works so we can't re-merge their changes 
back into Wikipedia, by choosing only the GFDL for their derived works. 
Of course, that in itself would be no reason to reject the agreement, 
because the current situation is just as bad: the single-licensed GFDL 
is inherently designed to permit poison pills via the addition of 
invariant sections.

-Mark