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

[geni]

2009/5/29 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> 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.

Strangely no since you would have an awfully hard time trying to
convince a court that by submitting content to wikipedia you were not
giving it permission to use that content in the way content is
typically used on wikipedia sites. The upshot of this is while the
content may be under the GFDL as far as third parties are concerned
the foundation effectively has a non exclusive license to use the
stuff on it's wikipedia website.

Thus the content can be switched to CC-BY-SA without the foundation
haveing to have followed the terms of the GFDL except those required
to allow the content to be used under CC-BY-SA (basically user names)


> 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.

Nope. It's enough to say their have been changes. "The original work
has been modified" would do in all cases since the license merely
requires that you note that changes have been made. It does not
require that you say what those changes were or how many of them there
were.



-- 
geni