[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[Sam Johnston]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:58 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm not talking about needs I'm talking about legal rights.
>
> Remember you can't use presumed consent in this situation so if you
> wanted to shift the credit to wikipedia you would need to track down
> and get agreement from every author (and whoever inherited in the
> cases where they have died). Given the amount of content we have from very occasional contributers this is impossible.

Nothing's impossible - where there's a will (and clearly there is[1])
there's a way. Mozilla managed to relicense to GPL years ago[2] (they
had an FAQ too[3]) and there's long been talk about moving the Linux
kernel from GPLv2 to GPLv3[4].

These moves are not easy and can be made significantly more difficult
by individuals (like yourself) working against the spirit of the
community. As Mozilla said in the FAQ, "by doing so you will make [the
work] useful to more people, which may result in others improving [the
work] to make it more useful to you", before going on to explain that
the 'spirit' of the new license was in line with that of the old.

The key difference is that they had only 450 contributors and the vast
majority were contactable. We have orders of magnitude more
contributors, many of whom are anonymous, aliased and/or without
contact details. The best we can do in this case is contact those who
we can, notify those who connect to the site and publish a notice of
our intentions.

So let's get this show on the road... there's been more than enough
compelling debate, academic wankery and downright noise already. Those
who are so concerned about the opinion others hold of them and feel
their right to self-aggrandisement is being trampled on can identify
themselves (and their edits) so as the rest of us can get on with
doing what we set out to do - building the free encyclopedia that
anyone can edit.

Sam

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Transition_to_CC-BY-SA#Discussion
2. http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4155
3. http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html
4. http://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/about_gplv3_can_the_linux_kernel_relicense