On 9/24/06, Fastfission <fastfission(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/24/06, David Alexander Russell
<webmaster(a)davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
1. You can't legally require anyone to
relicence their work just because
you decide you don't like the terms any more. They would be perfectly
entitled to say 'fuck you' (or some lawyer-approved legalese equivalent)
to the WMF
Legally? Who said anything about legally? We'd just be asking. Or
perhaps make it part of the conditions of use for the site.
You can't legally require anyone to release their content under the
GFDL. But we require it nonetheless for participants.
2. Making all future contributions
multi-licenceable would create two
problems:
a) New contributions may be licence-incompatible with new ones
b) A great deal of contributors would go to Citizendium instead
a. Multi-licensing doesn't have to mean exclusive licensing. I can
say, "My contributions are licensed GFDL, or CC-BY-SA. You can pick
the one which works best for you." Everything would be, at a minimum,
GFDL. I don't see compatibility within the project as a problem.
b. Why? Who cares? Is this really a threat -- a non-existant
Wiki-to-be which requires credentials? Can we, for a moment now, at
least stick with known problems, rather than making up new ones
relating to what is currently Ghostware?
FF
First, I agree that this is something we need to do, and obviously as
soon as possible.
The biggest problem will probably not be with "major contributors" but
with anons... the large majority of articles contain substantive
contributions from anons that we can't even track down to ask
permission from.
I wonder if it would be possible to simply declare, by fiat, that
previous anonymous contributions will be relicensed? Since we don't,
technically, follow the GFDL as it is, and other free licenses are
clearly consistent with the spirit of free content that any
contributor implicitly agrees to, it shouldn't be that big a deal.
The remaining problem would be outside text for which explicit
permission was obtained to license it under the GFDL for Wikipedia.
The owners of such content might conceivably get upset (and litigious)
over it. As a minimum safeguard, we would need to, by default, not
mulit-license any given existing entry until it was checked over for
such potentially problematic content (or content from editors who
refused to multi-license, but that could be done automatically).
-Ragesoss