[Foundation-l] Licensing transition: opposing points of view

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Sue Gardner wrote:
> I've been meaning to reply in this thread to what Jussi said. (Sorry to not reply inline; I'm on my Blackberry.)
>
>   
First of all, can I ask as a favor that you never again refer to me as 
"Jussi". Jussi is my grandpa.
I am Jussi-Ville, or "J-V" (Jay-Vee) for short. Often also known by my 
TLA "JVH" in contexts of
people like Mike Godwin, who date me from the early ages of the 
internet. I am not offended,
but I do want to make it clear that referring to me as "Jussi" does have 
significance.

> Jussi said he's only seen comments on the licensing issue from the staff, and not from the board. That may be true on this list, and it may be true for the specific piece of the conversation that interests him; I'm not sure.
>
> But I do want to point out two things.
>
> 1) At its January meeting, the board developed and unanimously voted to approve, a statement in favour of migration. I think it was included in my January report that was published here on foundation-l a few weeks ago. If I'm wrong and the full statement's not in in that report, let me know and I'll send it to this list. (Or Domas will, or another board member will.)
>
> 2) Also at the January board meeting, the board made an explicit request to staff and board members, to publicly speak their minds on this issue.  Some people probably would do that anyway, but the board wanted to explicitly request it in this case.  Why?  Because the license migration issue is pretty complex, and not everyone understands it well.
> Basically, people fall into three camps. 1., Those who are already knowledgeable, and have developed a position.  2., Those who aren't yet knowledgeable, but plan to read up in advance of the vote, in order to develop a position. And 3., those who don't plan to read up, and would rather trust others (board, staff, other volunteers) to do the research on their behalf, and to advise them. The board is encouraging knowledgeable staff and board members to express their opinions, as a service for those latter two groups.
>
> That is why you're hearing a lot from Erik and Mike in the license migration threads. Because they're knowledgeable about the issue, and the board has asked them to share what they think :-)
>
>   

These are valuable words. I genuinely trust that what has been generated 
has not been
only heat, but there has been some illumination shed on the issues as well.

Personally as I have said before I am somewhat wanly satisfied with 
where we stand at
the moment, provided there will be no back-sliding later. In an ideal 
world I would prefer
multi-licensing under *all* localized versions of CC-BY-SA 3.0 and a TOS 
that would
pre-emptively require assent to multi-licensing under any future 
localized versions. That
way the issue would squarely land on the re-user, and not on who adds 
material. That
is the editor wouldn't have to choose the jurisdictive limits of their 
licensing, but the
one creating a work outside wikimedia would have to do so. But it isn't 
clear that we
do live in an ideal world. ;-)


Yours, no offense taken nor hopefully given,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen