[WikiEN-l] Aneurysm

[Eugene van der Pijll]

Oskar Sigvardsson schreef:
> You're missing my point. When you contribute to an already existing
> article, you are making a derivative work based on that article, which
> is licensed under the GFDL. The GFDL states that if you make a
> derivative work from it you have to license it under the same terms,
> you can't just PD that thing because you are using the original
> authors work and he didn't allow you to do that.

That's correct. At the same time, if the contribution can stand alone as
a separate work, underived from the existing article, you may also
license that separate work under any license you want; after all, you,
the contributor, still have the copyright.

So: if you add a new paragraph to an article, there is a large chance
that you can license it CC-SA (for example). Adding one sentence to an
article in the middle of a paragraph, probably not. Changing one word:
certainly not. (Reverting to an older version you didn't write yourself:
no discussion possible)

But it's only the text of that one contribution that is dual-licensed.

If the article is CC-licensed as a whole (because all edits are from
dual-licensing editors), there is no problem, and the whole article can
be considered to be CC-licensed.

Dual-licensing notices should therefore say something like: "Unless
derived from just-GFDL-licensed content, my contributions are ... etc",
and people should check the article history before concluding anything
about the licenses. Which makes multi-licensing much less usefull.

Eugene