[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[George Herbert]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:

> > >> The torturous logic can't
> > >> disguise that the license has been GFDL from the git-go
> > >> and is not departing from that license against the prime
> > >> guardian of that license. That is the bare fact.
> > >>
> > >
> > >
> > > Huh?
> > >
> >
> > See my above reply.
>
>
> See mine.  I was speaking here with regard to the legal aspect of the
> license change, not with regard to what I find acceptable or unacceptable.
>
> Yes, the FSF has consented to this change (and shame on them for that), but
> the fact that they are only willing to do so under such convoluted terms
> has
> negative implications on the legal defensibility of it.
>
> That said, it also speaks to the fact that even the FSF doesn't find this
> change to be wholly acceptable.  They're not even willing to eat their own
> dogfood.  Hell, they've gone through much trouble to ensure that virtually
> no one except Wikipedia contributors has to eat it.
>

No, they've acknowledged that they're dogs, and we're a herd of cats, and
that perhaps we should have different food sources after all, despite having
started out at the same bowl license-wise.

It's bizarre to me that people are so vehemently defending the GFDL when it
was always clearly not the right license from a mechanics point of view.
Forget the philosophy and legalese - the mechanics of GFDL require stuff we
never did and never tried to do.  And we all looked at that and nodded and
said "Ok, but we won't call ourselves on that".

CC-BY-SA-3.0 has its flaws too, as we're finding here, but good god, it's
much closer to managably right with what we do...


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com