[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[Sam Johnston]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 7:35 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/2/3 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
>> Where can I read about what, exactly, the spirit of the GFDL is?
>
> Start with the license preamble "Secondarily, this License preserves
> for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work,"

Interesting you should choose to quote this while conveniently failing
to include the *primary* purpose:

"The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other
functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to
assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it,
with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially."

We are moving to the CC-BY-SA license to improve compatibility and
foster reuse, yes? The 'spirit' clause gives us a good deal of freedom
"to address new problems or concerns" and one of the primary residual
problems that many (most?) of us have relates to the secondary
purpose. Surely where the secondary purpose is at odds with the
primary purpose it is the primary purpose that should prevail?

Given that full attributions are both largely worthless and onerous to
the point of forbidding reuse in many circumstances (e.g. paragraph
quotes, most physical mediums, compilations, etc.) and partial
attributions are in many ways worse than no attributions at all,
surely attributing Wikipedia is the best way to achieve our primary
goals?

If your concern is that we will run out of content because we are not
attributing individuals then I wouldn't worry about that - there are
more than enough selfless people working tirelessly for no other
reason than to make the world a better place.

Kudos to Erik for the excellent summary,

Sam