[Foundation-l] Re-licensing

[Anthony]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:08 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/1/22 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> > So why can't a fork be in compliance with the GFDL?  You said that "The
> GFDL
> > 1.2 license is so bad that any fork would still be looking to use CC just
> in
> > a slightly more legal way."  What do you mean by this?
>
> What I mean is that if we consider the proposal to be legal under the
> CC license (I don't) then any fork would be better of using
> CC-BY-SA-3.0 without utilising the "Attribution Parties" bit of
> 4(C)(i). This means that it would get the benefits of the CC-BY-SA-3.0
> license without the downside that certain people appear to be trying
> to add.


I also don't consider the proposal to be legal under the CC license, but I
do think people will probably get away with it anyway.  Additionally, I
think whole concept of relicensing people's contributions under a different
license is immoral and legally questionable.

Thus, forking under GFDL 1.2 only has two distinct advantages: 1) it allows
people who consider "the benefits of the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license" to actually
be detriments, to continue to contribute; and 2) it disallows Wikipedia from
incorporating these changes, thus reducing the likelihood that third parties
will come along and use these changes without attribution.

I guess if you think the legal case is cut and dry those 10% could get
together and initiate a class-action lawsuit, or something, but forking is
probably easier and more effective.