I haven't been on this mailing list much, but I do think there is a role and place for
dual-licensed books to be both sought and worked on within the context of Wikibooks.
One thing that I think is reasonable to ask for is that the GFDL is one of the licenses
that must be included. I don't think there is any dispute here.
The problem comes from those editors who decide to contribute to a wikibook, but for some
reason or other explicitly don't want the "dual licensing" to continue. A
great deal of this can and IMHO should be in some sort of policy guideline for the
project.
There are some book projects that there are some very legitimate reasons for wanting to
continue the dual-license. We've gone over before some of those book projects that
want to be dual-licensed GPL/GFDL in order to ultimately include some GPL'd software
into the book in some sort of final distro. I've also seen some books that were to be
distributed with other items that were of some other free-type license (such as CC-by-SA
or some other similar license). In these cases, maintaining the dual-licensing can be
incredibly useful as we get the benefit of having the free content on Wikibooks, but the
"end users" can also use the content in a completely different context.
I would hope that dual-licensing aren't completely dismissed from Wikibooks, and I
especially would be abhorred by some "administrator" or other user randomly
going through all of the current wikibooks and removing all mention of any dual-licensing
content that currently exists. Such actions are IMHO contrary to a wiki spirit and this
is something that should receive further debate... especially if such drastic actions are
taking place.
More to the point, any changes that are irreversible (this is one of those type of
changes) due to Wikibooks policy needs careful consideration.
All this said, the dual-licensing is something that should be decided when the book is
established and is nearly impossible to change once multiple authors have contributed (in
a significant manner) to its contents.
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