[Foundation-l] Third-party GFDL text irrevocably incompatible with Wikipedia as of August 1

[Anthony]

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 6:00 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ditching the GFDL in favour of a licence that's actually possible to
> keep to in practice is one of the best ideas ever.


You haven't ditched the GFDL though.  In fact, the success of your
"relicensing" relies on the claim that you're following it.

Furthermore, you haven't shown that CC-BY-SA is any more "possible to keep
to in practice".  CC-BY-SA's history section is even more onerous than the
GFDL's.  Not only do you have to keep track of prior versions, but you have
to identify the changes as well.

Sure, you can handwave around it and claim that the authors have implicitly
waived these conditions (perhaps through a terms of service), but that's no
better than the GFDL situation.

This "move" hasn't made anything better, it has only made things worse.  The
one good thing it has done is that it has made it much more obvious to
everyone that anything contributed to a Wikimedia project is, essentially
and de facto, public domain (with maybe a twinge of copyleft, though it's
hard to see how even that can be enforced).