[Foundation-l] Re: wikinews and other stuff

[Andre Engels]

On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 18:40:47 -0700, Michael Snow
<wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:

> 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.

The justification and benefit is:
1. that we want to make dual licensing easier
2. that we see problems with the GNU/FDL, but at the same time are
stuck to it, so we want to be able to have something that can both be
put under the GNU/FDL and under a less restrictive license at the same
time

> 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.

The proposed license would make it easier, not harder, by expressly
specifying that the material can be published under other licenses as
well, and under what conditions.

> 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.

That's going to be hard, see the number of Cc-licenses that are
around. You can't satisfy everyone at once.

Andre Engels