[WikiEN-l] Escaping the GDFL -- can it be done?

[Stephen Bain]

On 3/3/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So how to escape?

Easy! Three steps:

1. Get everyone who has ever contributed to WP to revoke their GFDL
licensing, and re-license the stuff as whatever;
2. Buy out the copyright in all derivative works (ie, all the forks);
3. Buy out all the mirrors.

> Based on this principle: can one really ask users to
> re-(multi)-license their PAST contributions? That is, can I say, "All
> those contributions I said were under the GFDL? Well, now I want them
> to also be GFDL or CC-BY-SA." Legally, I'm suspicious, but I'm also
> not a lawyer.

If you own the copyright you can release it under whatever licence you
choose. Someone changing to multi-licencing can make all their past
edits available under a different licence without any problems - it
simply takes effect from the date they multi-licence.

> It is just a thought I had -- the only one I could come up with which
> seems really plausible, aside from the possibility of the FSF being
> convinced to make updates to the GFDL (which I suspect they would be
> very dubious about, especially if the edits were primarily to benefit
> Wikipedia).

While other ways forward are theoretically possible, in practice this
is our best option. All the content is already licenced under "GFDL
1.2 or any later version." I can't recall where I saw it exactly, but
I do remember some FSF people talking about making future versions of
the GFDL more compatible with projects like WP. Our use of GFDL is
good for everyone, including the FSF, so I wouldn't put it completely
out of consideration that they'd make the next versions better for us!

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com