On 9/24/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/24/06, David Alexander Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
- 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.
- 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