[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[Anthony]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 12:14 AM, George Herbert
<george.herbert at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.


Personally, I'm not defending the GFDL.  In fact, I will make any reasonable
effort to revoke it.

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".


Not everyone.  Some of us have been arguing that Wikipedia should take the
GFDL more seriously for years now.  That would be a good first step.

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...


That may be the case, but even if it is it still doesn't justify the
relicensing that is currently taking place.  The power to release content
under new licenses should be (and is) held by the authors individually, not
collectively.  "Or later" was meant for minor changes or when fundamental
flaws/loopholes were found in the license itself, not for the case when a
supermajority of license users decides they should have picked a different
license.  At least that's what I and many others thought is was meant for.
The FSF violated an important trust when they introduced this relicensing
clause into GFDL 1.3, and that's the biggest flaw with the GFDL.

Finally, a point which seems to be missed.  The WMF is not considering
switching from GFDL to CC-BY-SA.  It is considering switching from GFDL only
to dual licensing under GFDL and CC-BY-SA.  In terms of protection of the
legal rights of the copyright owners, such a switch can *only* make things
worse, not better.