[Foundation-l] Re: wikinews and other stuff

[Michael Snow]

Jean-Christophe Chazalette wrote:

>I strongly support the Wikimedia License idea. GDFL is not that appropriate
>to Wikis for plenty of reasons. I'll tell them when there'll be a real issue
>here :) Suffice it to say that considering what wiki actually is,
>technically, and what kind of ambition Wfoundation actually has, a
>tailor-made license would be just *better*. Of course, I would join any
>thinktank about this topic and even would accept to draft the main lines -
>with the help of a decent French-English translator ... of course.
>villy
>  
>
While I support efforts to improve the GFDL and make it more compatible 
with other free licenses like some of those Creative Commons offers, I'm 
not that enthusiastic about the idea of developing a new 
Wikimedia-specific license. Both for our benefit in using material from 
other sources, and to maintain good relations with the rest of the 
free-content community, I think we should resist creating a new license 
unless we can clearly articulate the justification and benefits  of 
creating yet another license.

Due to the nature of copyleft licenses, proliferating more of them only 
makes it harder to interchange content between them, even though they're 
supposed to be free. Ideally, I would like to have a system where you 
can just identify something generically as copyleft and people will 
understand what that means in the same way that they understand the 
basic principle of copyright today. But approaching that by reconciling 
different licensing systems is difficult, and this stage may be better 
achieved with the help of legislation.

--Michael Snow