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

[Anthony]

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 10:09 AM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.


I'm not sure where you get the "no" from.  The relicensing was done for the
sake of third parties, not for "Wikipedia sites".


> 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)


It can be relicensed under CC-BY-SA by the copyright holders, sure.  But you
seem to be implying something more than that.  I'm not sure what, though.