[Foundation-l] The license situation

[Delirium]

David Gerard wrote:
> 2008/10/19 John at Darkstar <vacuum at jeb.no>:
>
>   
>> I hope no one seeriously consider using that site for defining what
>> writers on Wikipedia means about free cultural works. If so, then
>> someone should think through very carefully how the comunity operates
>> and how it will react on something like this.
>>     
>
>
> I think you're about eighteen months late in saying so:
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy
>
> Of course, some of "the community" have ideas on what licenses mean
> that are frankly on crack. We've had people make admin on en:wp
> without understanding that GFDL works they create can be used outside
> Wikimedia.
>   

To be fair, it's hard to find a succinct, non-legalese explanation. =]

The closest I could find to a plainly phrased description of Wikipedia's 
licensing status linked from the front page is from 
Wikipedia:Copyrights, to wit: "Wikipedia content can be copied, 
modified, and redistributed /so long as/ the new version grants the same 
freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article 
used (a direct link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy 
the attribution requirement)."

But this sentence is the 3rd sentence of the 2nd paragraph of the 
article. There's a status-of-this-page box at the top, a billion 
disambiguation hatnotes, a full disclaimer paragraph with bolded intro, 
then the nondescript/nondelineated beginning of the actual page, and 
even then an analogy of our still-to-be-discussed copyright status to 
free software's copyright status, and a mention that this is related to 
the as-yet-undefined term "copyleft". Then after all that you get to the 
quoted sentence above which actually says something about our copyrights. =]

-Mark