[Licom-l] Opt-out?

[Robert Rohde]

One of the unresolved issues in my estimation is how to react to
people who say: "Relicensing?  Not my work, no way, no how!".

We've already got a few examples of this (e.g. Anthony's text,
Fir0002's images).  Legally it would appear we can ignore such
objections though there is some risk of a court challenge.  However,
in the interest of stemming criticism and respecting our valued
contributors, we may want to consider allowing some people to opt-out
some content.

Most obvious is whether we want to allow people to retroactively
change GFDL 1.2+ tags to GFDL 1.2-only on their images and media files
in order to prevent the addition of a CC-BY-SA declaration.  Assuming
GFDL 1.2 images continue to be allowed, this would be a minimally
disruptive step since no content would be removed from the projects.
While we could relicense such images despite contributor objections, I
think the goodwill of our contributors is probably a more useful
commodity than adding CC-BY-SA to any particular set of images.  I
think I am probably in favor of allowing images to be opt-out in this
way, with some specified deadline, especially if the communities
continue to allow GFDL-1.2 uploads.

Text is a different matter since pretty much any text that isn't
migrated would have to be deleted, and that would almost certainly be
disruptive at some level.  (Anthony actually offered to do those
deletions himself, so it wouldn't necessarily have to burden others
with the work of removing content.)  I might even be in favor of
replacing text if it could be done in a minimally disruptive way (an
article on widgets can certainly be rewritten without depending on
text from any specific editor), but the burden in doing so is likely
to be high and so I would want to see that any editors trying to do
that had an active strategy for minimizing that burden and not dumping
it on the community at large.

Other thoughts?

-Robert Rohde