[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/2/3 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
> Where can I read about what, exactly, the spirit of the GFDL is?
> I've already explained why flexible attribution is equivalent to full
> attribution in a recent post. It's easy to do the reverse lookup from a
> piece of content to its authors. Anyone wanting to know who the content
> should be attributed can easily find that out. We can develop tools to make
> it easier.

You can't read about exactly the the spirit of something is. The whole
point of "spirit" is that is is separate to what to put into words.
When you put it into words, something is lost. I expect there are
plenty of discussions on the subject around if you look for them,
though - you may want to start with
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

> But back to your spirit argument. Why would a CC-Wiki that is more practical
> about attribution be against the spirit of the GFDL?

That depends on what the differences are. If there is anything
particularly significant (and attributing "Wikipedia" rather than the
actual author is significant), then you can't do it. The differences
between GFDL and CC-BY-SA are basically just about the details of how
you do things, rather than the end result, so there isn't a problem.
(And even that is controversial.)