[Foundation-l] Suggestions for GFDL-CC harmonization FAQ

[geni]

2008/11/7 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> Muwahaha yourself. *cracks knuckles, gets typing*
>
> Q. So what's wrong with the GFDL?
>
> A. The GFDL was written as a licence for software manuals on paper
> with one or a few authors. It's not at all suited to wiki content with
> possibly hundreds of editors.

Every license tends to fall apart when you start throwing that number
of authors at it



> ** Even cutting and pasting text between two Wikipedia articles is
> technically a violation unless the full author list for that piece of
> text is attached. This is not workable on a wiki.

This doesn't change with CC-BY-SA.


> Q. Why didn't the FSF just say "OK, the next GFDL is the same as CC by-sa"?
>
> A. Because, despite Wikimedia sites being by far the largest corpus of
> GFDL content, the FSF needed to keep important details of how the
> license works the same for its original audience: authors of software
> manuals.


Close. From what I can tell software manuals actually use features in
the GFDL that are not in CC-BY-SA such as cover texts and invariant
sections.


-- 
geni