[Foundation-l] Re-licensing

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> 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.

1) I would suggest that the number of people who care strongly about
the particular license used and consider such a switch to be a
"detriment" is small indeed. This isn't to say that this group should
be ignored, only that they aren't going to represent a community with
enough viability to sustain a project the size of Wikipedia.

> 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.

Forking may certainly be easier, but it's hard for me to imagine that
a fork of Wikipedia with 10% of it's population (and I posit that to
be a high estimate) will be viable. A slogan of "knowledge is free,
but reusing it is more difficult because of our stringent attitudes
towards attribution" isn't going to inspire too many donors when
fundraising time rolls around. Plus, Wikipedia's database (I assume
you only want to fork Wikipedia, and maybe only the English one) is
non-negligible and will cost money to have hosted.

Fewer people will use the fork and it will grow more slowly, if it
grows at all, because of licensing problems with content use and
reuse. The fork will progressively become harder to use and will
become more out of touch with the rest of the world of open content
knowledge. You'll be able to say that at least if nobody is reusing
your content that there is no chance they will be violating the
attribution requirement as you've defined it.

Given the option between two wikipedias, one that is large and easy to
use/reuse/incorporate and one that is small and with a difficult
licensing scheme, I think you can guess where the new contributors and
new donation dollars will be heading. I don't want to threaten or mock
here, but I also don't want to see anybody's valuable contributions be
wasted.

--Andrew Whitworth