On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 8:17 PM, darklama darklama@gmail.com wrote:
I think before Wikibooks goes jumping head first into outright accepting dual licensed books, Wikibooks first needs to as a project find solutions to its current problems:
- People are left hanging when it comes to what they need to do in
order to be in compliance with the GFDL. This requires people to be experts in GFDL compliance.
I agree, and maybe it's worth our while to write up either an FAQ page about the GFDL, or shooting higher we could create an entire book about the GFDL. This would be an excellent opportunity to form some kind of working partnership with the FSF, or some other free content organization. Such a partnership and such a resource would help drive more traffic to Wikibooks. We could also see if groups like the FSF have any content on the issue already that they would be willing to make a donation of. Again, there is good advertising potential in this.
- People are left to figure out what licenses images and other media
use, or if public domain or fair use is being used, and what that means for there reuse, assuming people are even aware that other considerations are necessary when reusing those parts of a book.
Agreed, the situation is already sticky enough because of multi-licensed images. I've experimented in the past with creating PDF versions and print versions of books that include licensing information about images in the book. This, to make a long story short, is very difficult, tedious, time-consuming manual work. I would love to see a technical solution implemented where image licensing information was automatically included in a generated print or PDF version. With the PDF extension in betatesting currently, this is the kind of feature we should be requesting en masse.
- People are left on their own when it comes to any legal ramifications
that might steam from getting any of this wrong, reducing the likelihood that Wikibooks content will be reused, redistributed, and modified outside of Wikibooks, except by the most savvy of users.
Herein lies the largest problem, I think, and the biggest impetus for us adopting a more flexible licensing scheme. We benefit internally from GFDL-consistency, but outside the WMF cloak the GFDL is not a particularly popular license for written content. Unfortunately we have thousands of books and sheer momentum dictates that we have to stay with the GFDL, at least as the primary license. This might be good reason for us to start putting pressure on the WMF, FSF, and CC to work on license interoperability issues.
I think Wikibooks needs to solve these problems before even considering trying to tackle dual licensed books and how to make it work, instead of ignoring the current problems.
I would welcome a change in licensing policies if we could do it in a manner that was consistent in terms of implementation and legality. We obviously can't just change the license terms on existing books. I don't agree with any solution that is hacked together, tacked on after the fact, or handled haphazardly. Telling our authors that they can select arbitrary sets of licenses for their book, so long as they post disclaimers everywhere is very haphazard and is a poor implementation of this goal we seem to share.
--Andrew Whitworth