[WikiEN-l] GFDL and images

[Fastfission]

On 6/11/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/06/07, K P <kpbotany at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Precisely why are we stuck with it?  If it were an article it would be
> > up for deletion.
>
> We have a choice:
>
> a) Drop the GFDL and pick a better license (ABL). The problem here is
> that we cannot legitimately use anything that is licensed under GFDL,
> unless we convince its author(s) to relicense their work under ABL.
>
> Net effect: 98% of Wikipedia articles or so - including virtually
> every single significant one - have to be abandoned and started again
> from scratch. We'd only get to keep the ones where we could contact
> all the contributors (well, all as of a certain revision whose
> material had not been removed in that revision, and you might have fun
> arguing that last clause) and get them to relicense their work - in
> effect, only single-author articles by currently active users.
>
> b) Live with it.

I've long wondered what license we'd use if we had a chance to change
it somehow. One of the main problems with free content licenses is
their incompatibility and their inability to be retrospectively
changed, which is important for a project like a wiki. Obviously we
wouldn't want them to be changed towards a more-unfree direction.

The best solution I could come up with was what I thought of as a
"Container" license. Basically the license would say, "This material
is licensed under one of the below licenses, and you may pick any one
of them for re-use: GFDL, CC-BY-SA. By contributing to Wikipedia, you
agree to let the Wikimedia Foundation add additional licenses to this
list as it sees fit, though they can never retrospectively remove
licenses from this list. New licenses added to this list much share
these basic components of free-content: <some agreed upon components
go here.>"

Of course doing that retroactively would be tough, but it would be
pretty flexible in the long term. It would basically be splitting the
licensing issue into somewhat different zones for contributors and
re-users, and contributors, by contributing, would agree to let the
WMF have some general abilities to expand the acceptible licenses as
the context of a later time allowed for. There would also be some
guarantees built into it that would make sure the WMF would not be
able to do something very un-free with it. The goal would not to be
add an infinite number of licenses, but just to have the ability to
dual- or triple-license as the changing copyright landscape felt fit.
If CC became the common currency of free content, it'd be stupid if
Wikipedia wasn't compatible with that.

Anyway, this is just a daydream, I know. Not going to happen.

FF