Alex R. wrote:
I am not certain why there is a discussion of
assigning copyright
to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course anyone is free to make
such a contribution (though I doubt they will get a tax deduction
for it) but it is not necessary IMHO for Wikimedia to use materials
under the open license it already has, perhaps I do not understand
the question, but what specifically cannot be acheived with the
current open license that every Wikipedia contributor grants when
they make contributions to any Wikipedia space?
I would say that the primary driving concern that we have is that
there are starting to be materials published under other free and
copyleft licenses (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike being most
prominent) that are incompatible with the GNU FDL. We'd love to be
able to cut and paste willy-nilly between all free resources, but we
can't, due to issues of license incompatibility.
http://www.wikitravel.org, or example, is CC ATT-SA, so we can't use
their materials and they can't use ours, not without specific
permission. That's a real shame, and it's why I'm trying to get them
to change their license while they are just starting to get off the
ground.
--Jimbo