On 6/11/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/06/07, K P kpbotany@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