[Wikimedia-l] License issue on GPL and CC-by-sa mix up

[Andre Engels]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Mathieu Stumpf
<psychoslave at culture-libre.org> wrote:

> One of my favorite wikimedia project is the wiktionary, I probably use
> it everyday and I like to contribute on the french chapter here and
> there.
>
> As I'm learning esperanto, I wanted to improve the french wiktionary on
> this topic. My first thought was to begin by gathering a list of
> vocabulary, make a todo page with links and go on.
>
> But I found that there is already a free/libre dictionary out there :
> Reta Vortaro[1]. Morever this dictionary provide definition in several
> languages, so I thought instead of making a word by word contribution
> only for the french chapter, I could add a whole esperanto dictionary to
> several chapters in once. It sounds great doesn't it ?
>
> Unfortunately, this dictionary is under GPL which is a well known free
> license (but a strange choice for a non-software project). So I would
> like to know, can I mix up a GPL content with a CC-by-sa page (in cases
> where such a page already exist), and more generaly can I add GPL
> content into the wiktionary.

No. What you stumbled upon is a well-known (at least to me) problem of
share-alike licences: The only thing they are two-way compatible with
is themselves. Even if one would have a different license with exactly
the same meaning, it would not be possible to move texts from that
license to CC-BY-SA (or GPL or whatever) or vice versa.


-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com