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

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

Fastfission wrote:
> And now... for something completely different.
> 
<snip>
> The idea of multi-licensing has been pursued on the project at
> different times, whereby contributions are indicates as being
> licenseable under the GFDL or another, similarly "free" license (i.e.,
> CC-BY-SA or CC-SA). There was also the big push, awhile ago, to get
> users to put templates on their user pages indicating that their
> present, future, and, I think, *past* contributions were
> multi-licensed as well -- I believe it had to do with making certain
> articles compatible with WikiCities' license. The basic idea was to
> run a bot to find all of the "authors" the articles in question and
> see if they would agree to this. I don't know how this worked out, but
> it was an interesting idea.
> 

It initially started with the Rambot articles, so that WikiTravel could
use them.

> 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.
> 

Um, Stallman says CC is bad, because people assume that all Creative
Commons licenses are the same without understanding the consequences -
so people don't understand why cc-by-nd-nc isn't a Free license. "But
it's Creative Commons!" they protest. "You use /that/ stuff which is
Creative Commons, so why not mine?"

> If this principle works -- couldn't we change the terms of use? That
> is, instead of every edit being licenseable under the GFDL, couldn't
> we change it to say that "this contribution, and any other
> contribution I have previously made, is licenseable under the GFDL or
> any other similarly 'free' license"? It wouldn't necessarily get *all*
> of the content out of the GFDL but, if we assume that many of the
> editors now were editors previously, it would potentially "free up" a
> very large amount of content. If an individual editor objected to this
> for some reason (I can't imagine why, but let's just say they did),
> then they'd be prohibited from editing, the same way we do when people
> suddenly claim that the intent to retain copyright on their edits.
> 

Well, you'd need to define "similarly free" first...

Supposing that this was put into place, all that would change from an
editor's point of view would be the edit page - instead of "Content must
not violate any copyright and must be verifiable. You agree to license
your contributions under the GFDL", it would have the name of the other
license/complex licensing conditions.

Speaking of people objecting to our current licensing, check out
[[Talk:Bruce Perens]]. Apparantly he objects to us having an article on
him, because he has issues with the license we are using... oh, and
apparantly we're neither a Free Software project *or* an Open Source
project. Hrm.

-- 
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
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