[Licom-l] More on dual licensing (updating Q&A)

[Erik Moeller]

2009/5/28 Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com>:
> 5. "It will be the obligation of re-users to validate whether an
> article includes CC-BY-SA-only changes – dual licensing should not be
> a burden on editors."
> This certainly should be a burden on editors insofar as one should
> expressly indicate when material is being imported from a CC-BY-SA
> source.  This comment requires much more than a statement.  If there
> is no simple way for one to do this, it should be touted less boldly.
> If there is a simple way, we should define it -- it seems to me this
> will require some work and programming over time.

Let me clarify our position here.

WMF did not go into discussions with the FSF with a proposal to
dual-license. We asked to be allowed to switch to CC-BY-SA. FSF agreed
to the FDL 1.3 release on the condition of limited dual-licensing. We
tried to identify the dual-licensing approach that would be the least
onerous, both organizationally and community-wise, to support this.

WMF will not spend money and time to support dual-licensing beyond
what we have already stated. WMF does, in fact, _not_ encourage the
creation of complex dual-licensing tracking tools and mechanisms that
might make Wikimedia projects harder to understand. WMF _does_
recognize the need to attribute CC-BY-SA content from third parties,
and whatever mechanisms are used to attribute, should be sufficient
for people needing to use content under GFDL to identify whether
CC-BY-SA-only content is present.

WMF doesn't currently have plans to push for dropping the GFDL
entirely, and is currently not interested in developing such plans.
WMF also doesn't make any guarantees as to the continued availability
of the GFDL option.

Regarding the licensing update and Q&A page: I think those pages will
need to be refactored as we move past proposal to implementation. I
don't think it would necessarily be wise to modify the historical
pages, which reference a proposal that has now been decided upon.
Instead, I'm in favor of developing a new entry page and associated
Q&A (based on the historical one) as we finalize the terms and
process.

This brings us to our second question, namely, how external content is
going to be attributed. I will address that question in a separate
message.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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