[Textbook-l] Dual-licensed wikibooks

[robert_horning at netzero.net]

I haven't been on this mailing list much, but I do think there is a role and place for dual-licensed books to be both sought and worked on within the context of Wikibooks.

One thing that I think is reasonable to ask for is that the GFDL is one of the licenses that must be included.  I don't think there is any dispute here.

The problem comes from those editors who decide to contribute to a wikibook, but for some reason or other explicitly don't want the "dual licensing" to continue.  A great deal of this can and IMHO should be in some sort of policy guideline for the project.

There are some book projects that there are some very legitimate reasons for wanting to continue the dual-license.  We've gone over before some of those book projects that want to be dual-licensed GPL/GFDL in order to ultimately include some GPL'd software into the book in some sort of final distro.  I've also seen some books that were to be distributed with other items that were of some other free-type license (such as CC-by-SA or some other similar license).  In these cases, maintaining the dual-licensing can be incredibly useful as we get the benefit of having the free content on Wikibooks, but the "end users" can also use the content in a completely different context.

I would hope that dual-licensing aren't completely dismissed from Wikibooks, and I especially would be abhorred by some "administrator" or other user randomly going through all of the current wikibooks and removing all mention of any dual-licensing content that currently exists.  Such actions are IMHO contrary to a wiki spirit and this is something that should receive further debate... especially if such drastic actions are taking place.  

More to the point, any changes that are irreversible (this is one of those type of changes) due to Wikibooks policy needs careful consideration.

All this said, the dual-licensing is something that should be decided when the book is established and is nearly impossible to change once multiple authors have contributed (in a significant manner) to its contents.

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