[Textbook-l] Dual-licensed wikibooks

[Martin Swift]

Dear comrads,

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 2:55 AM, mike.lifeguard
<mike.lifeguard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm wondering how we reconcile situations like
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Uim and
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Scratch/Content_License
>
> These are GFDL plus PD and CC-by-sa respectively. But we have no indication
> whatsoever that contributors to the book (except Swift and Rob respectively)
> have agreed to this arrangement.

Visiting any page at Wikibooks and hitting the "Edit this page" tab at
the top of the page, one is taken to a page with a form containing the
Mediawiki markup for the page one has chosen to edit. At the bottom of
that page is a clause that includes:

  Please note that all contributions to Wikibooks are considered to be released
  under the GNU Free Documentation Licence (see Wikibooks:Copyrights
for details).

At the top of the "Uim" book main page there is a clause that states that

  This wikibook is in the public domain. Any changes to its Wikibooks copy will
   be assumed to be released into the public domain.

One could argue that we have little more of an idea whether
contributors have agreed to the former, than the latter.

I can find two possible problems with this. Firstly, there is the
inconsistency that the edit page clause doesn't mention the
possibility of dual licensing. On the other hand, the clause doesn't
say that the content is considered to be released under the GFDL, *and
that license only*. Ambiguous but not mutually exclusive.

Secondly, the PD clause isn't on the edit page itself, and that on the
book sub-pages, the license is linked to, rather than quoted in full.
That is, of course, only a valid point as long as Wikibooks is
required to obtain users' consent of the license in a particular way.
If such a requirement does exist, and states that the clause must be
placed on the edit page itself, then I think we can quite easily
reconcile this situation by modifying the current clause to mention
the possibility of other licensing.

If no such requirement exists, I would say that the Uim book makes an
honest and sufficient attempt to inform contributors of the PD
licence.

The edit page clause links to
  <http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Copyrights>