[Foundation-l] The license situation

[Michael Snow]

geni wrote:
> Best I can tell the last official statement from the FSF on the GSFDL
> was over two years ago (back when we were running mediawiki 1.7) there
> have been the odd unofficial statements but they came to nothing. This
> being the case we must assume the GSFDL is dead or so comatose as to
> be out of the picture (not entirely a bad thing the license was
> painfully bad).
>
> The moves to try and get some form of CC-BY-SA /GFDL merger appear to
> have ground to a halt.
>
> So what can we do. Ignoring the situation isn't a long term viable option.
>
> There is the stick. We could prevent say further GFDL only image
> uploads and produce a press release explaining why.
>
> Other options are putting together a group to actively lobby the FSF
> to get something done but I'm not sure they would react to that to
> well.
>
> So what to do?
>   
The issue is being worked on and is not nearly dead or comatose. I 
suppose the GSFDL might be, most of the discussion I'm aware of has been 
focused simply on an updated release of the GFDL. But we've been talking 
to the FSF for the last several months and appreciate their efforts to 
work with us. Right now I believe we're waiting to hear back from them 
and firm up some timing issues. Erik and Mike have been handling much of 
this on the Wikimedia side, and they can elaborate if there are new 
developments that are ready to share. I don't think we'll see an 
outright merger, the two licenses will always exist independently, but 
I'm optimistic that there will be a way for us to deal with the barriers 
between our GFDL content and our CC-BY-SA content.

--Michael Snow