[Foundation-l] status of the licensing update

[Anthony]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 11:38 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <
cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:

> Robert Rohde wrote:
> > If someone comes to us and says: "I want to print a copy of [[France]]
> > in my book.  What is a reasonable way to comply with the license?",
> > then we really ought to be able to answer that question.  If we can't
> > agree on an acceptable answer to that question under CC-BY-SA, then we
> > probably shouldn't be considering adopting it.
> >
>  Again I have to record dissent. Do keep in mind that under
> what we are escaping from under, not even the guardians
> of that license were able to answer that question. So staying
> under GFDL is not a real way to dodge the issue.
>

The GFDL has problems which need to be fixed.  If the "relicensing" under
CC-BY-SA occurs, that's much less likely to happen.

Now on the gripping hand, if the real problem you have
> here is the fear that some time later, after the migration
> the foundation were to unilaterally express an interpretation
> of allowable "reasonable" forms of attribution, I would have
> to regretfully admit that given past form (and sadly, opinions
> expressed by some influential people in the foundation staff)
> that is not unfathomable.


And then there's that, which is by far my biggest problem with this switch.

I'd much rather see a switch to the GSFDL, with some sort of clause added to
that license allowing combining of history lines into a single line listing
all significant authors, in the case of an MMORPG (or whatever it is the FSF
has chosen for the codeword for Wikipedia).

The only thing I can offer is that
> that would of course be a new ball game, and the same
> people waving whiffle-bats around, would be involved there
> and then, again. I not only think possible, but am reassured
> that a bad result could not stand, for long. Please trust the
> good sense of the community being able to countermand
> the understandable errors of the foundations operatives.


Rushing to a premature decision is exactly the problem that provided the
GFDL in the first place.  I see no reason not to take the time to do things
right.  Even if the August 1, 2009 deadline can't be reached (and I see no
reason for this), it can always be extended via a GFDL 1.4.  (Or even
better, GFDL 2.0 whose draft already contains a GSFDL clause.)