[Foundation-l] GFDL 1.3 Release

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> 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.

As far as I am able to understand, it wouldn't be so. Any SA-only
contribution has to be marked because of SA terms. So, in the case of
importing article from the Encyclopedia of Earth, there will be a note
"This article is imported from the Encyclopedia of Earth under the
terms of CC-BY-SA xx.xx". Also, I am sure that lists of sources at the
projects will have information about the terms of usage. So, every
page will be visibly marked as CC-BY-SA-only or it will be
GFDL/CC-BY-SA if not marked with a particular attribution tag.

However, it is true that in the future there will be a lot of
CC-BY-SA-only articles and that re-users will have to analyze which
parts of the article are CC-BY-SA-only if they are willing to
incorporate it at GFDL-only document.