[Foundation-l] GFDL 1.3 Release

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 8:06 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/11/4  <psychoslave at culture-libre.org>:
>>> 1)the GFDL is not in any meaningful sense a free license so we do need
>>> to switch away
>
>> Can you explain me why, or point me to a page which would ?
>
>
> Read the discussions on this list. We have people seriously saying
> that we can't switch away from GFDL because they've promised
> photographers "the GFDL only pretends to be a free license, it isn't
> really" as if that's a *feature*.

You've stated this a couple of times David, and I think it's unfair.

Many professional photographers come to us and say  "I sell many of
images for use as stock photography in commercial publications,
textbooks, etc. I'll lose that if I give my works away!",  to which I
(and many other people reply) "If you GFDL your image, then people can
only build freely licensed works out of it.  This kind of tit-for-tat
trade of free for free encourages the creation of more free works
while preserving the market of selling to people who are printing
non-freely-licensed works, which is most of the market anyways.  GFDL
also requires attribution, and that redistributors ship along a copy
of the license text so that recipients know their rights. So it's not
equivalent to simply giving your work away."

There is nothing unfree about that position.  It's allowed us to get
many works which would otherwise only be all-rights-reserved or maybe
cc-by-nc-nd.

Considering that copyrights may well last forever through perpetual
repeated retroactive extensions, the copyleft encouragement to free
additional works is very important.  That it also provides a way for
existent full time content creators to participate some without losing
their income is just gravy.