[Licom-l] Dual-licensing confusion

[Samuel Klein]

Many people are confused about the intent and effect of the limited
dual-licensing that is planned.  This has been amplified by the social
desire of people guiding the process to say two conflicting things at
once: both "we want to support GFDL reusers, and don't want this to be
an abrupt shift" and "one day soon the projects will be almost
entirely cc-by-sa".

We should be clear to current and potential partners that despite the
effort through limited dual licensing to extend the availability of
up-to-date GFDL text, it is a temporary measure.

The only polite way I know of to express strong support for GFDL
reusers is to put energy into providing them with more and clearer
information about articles.  That is, to the extent that there are
third-party reusers of GFDL encyclopedic material, Wikimedia could
maintain a read-only snapshot of the latest GFDL revisions of all
articles.  It could at the same time include a checkbox on the edit
page for all  dual-licensed pages to indicate the inclusion of
cc-by-sa material.  Once such material is included, the page would be
flagged as no-longer-GFDL in the databse.  Of course the flagging user
could be wrong, just as whoever is expected to independently
assess/verify the non-cc-sa-only nature of every edit made since June
15 could be wrong.  But this would make the meaning and effect of the
dual license provisions crystal clear.

SJ