[Foundation-l] GFDL 1.3 Release

[Thomas Dalton]

> 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.

The way I see it, that's equivalent to not being dual licensed at all,
since there is no way for a re-user to know what licenses things are
under unless we tell them. (However, I think we need to tell them in
order to comply with the licenses ourselves, so the whole thing is
moot.)