[Foundation-l] Licensing resolution

[Mike.lifeguard]

I have been keeping an eye on what content got imported on English
Wikibooks. If there has been anything imported from offsite GFDL-only
sources I'm not aware of it. To be honest though, that's not saying much
- we often have contributors bring us whole books they wrote elsewhere -
but that's not a violation since they'd be the copyright holder and can
relicense it however they want. I doubt there are any similar cases
which do violate the terms, but I'd love some help checking that.

-Mike


On Fri, 2009-05-22 at 07:36 -0700, Robert Rohde wrote:

> On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 7:05 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks to everyone for handling the process so cleanly, and with an
> > abundance of good information.
> >
> > Would it be possible to change the license switch to August 1 rather
> > than June 15?
> >
> > I would like to point out the next major step, for which there is no
> > time to lose : content compatibility with other GFDL sites will become
> > impossible on August 1 -- after then, not only will we no longer be
> > able to import materials currently under the GFDL (which will become
> > impossible as soon as we decide to switch over licenses), but it will
> > also no longer be possible for currently GFDL massively-collaborative
> > sites to choose to make the same switchover that we are making (the
> > GFDL provision is only valid until August 1).
> >
> > There are hundreds of educational sites with excellent material that
> > have chosen their current GFDL license in order to be compatible with
> > Wikipedia. Some of them will not be able to decide to switch
> > licensing terms by August 1; others do not qualify for the
> > license-switching option in the first place. We should make a serious
> > devoted effort to reach all of them -- including informing readers
> > about what is going on and how they can help preserve compatibility of
> > license with their own sites.
> 
> Three points:
> 
> 1) We'd like to have all our copyright statements, terms of use, image
> templates, and whatever else updated before the August 1st deadline.
> That way there is no ambiguity about whether content was relicensed in
> a timely fashion.  Doing that, including the various translations,
> will require a significant lead time.
> 
> 2) The migration is an incentive to other sites to also relicense.
> Given that, it behooves us to get moving early enough that other sites
> will also have time to react before the deadline.  Seeing the changes
> we make will also give them a blueprint to what they may need to do.
> Incidentally, the news coverage of this event so far has been quite
> limited, which makes it more important that we have an outreach effort
> to communicate what is happening to other GFDL projects that may wish
> to change.
> 
> 3) Content importing from GFDL sites (which are not also CC-BY-SA, and
> do not get relicensed by their owners) is already impossible now.  One
> of the provisions of the relicensing is that externally published
> content (i.e. material originally published somewhere other than a WMF
> wiki) can only be relicensed if it was already in our site before
> November 1, 2008.  Any GFDL text imported after that date will
> probably have to be deleted.  This doesn't happen very often on the
> Wikipedias, but it is a bigger concern for Wikibooks and Wikisource.
> 
> -Robert Rohde
> 
>