[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

geni geniice at gmail.com
Tue Feb 3 23:59:17 UTC 2009


2009/2/3 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
> You have a very clear sense of what is legal and what is not.
>
> However, I am under the impression that in this case the FSF and CC
> determine what is legal since there are very few cases where these issues
> have been brought up in court.

They don't come up often but that doesn't mean that FSF and CC
determine what is legal.

>The FSF and CC determine what the licenses
> "say" and whether or not a potential break with particular verbiage is in
> the spirit of the licenses. They've already demonstrated that what the
> licenses say are flexible to the needs of the WMF.

Flexibility has it's limits.

> You can argue all day long about what licenses "actually" say. Ultimately I
> don't think there will be that much of an issue in that area.

Matthew Katzer and Kamind Associates tried that one. They lost.


>The real thing
> we need to discover are the needs of the WMF. What kind of attribution is *most
> consistent with the goals of the projects? *Flexible attribution of course.
> We are leaving the GFDL for good reason - no need to drag it along with us
> in the change to CC-BY-SA.

Changes we would like to see in CC-BY-SA-3.X/4.0 are a very separate
issue from how to we manage the switchover to 3.0. There are some
other very big players in the CC field. Expecting CC to go along with
whatever we decide is not a sensible strategy (particularly when you
consider at least one of the crediting options suggested would allow
for the crediting of every flickr image to yahoo).


-- 
geni




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