LittleDan wrote:
AFAICT, The FSF has no discression over how we use the
licence unless they sue us. And if we , for example,
switch wikipedia to the Creative Commons, then nothing
bad can happen without lawsuit for something like
which licence's text was there, which is extremely
unlikely IMO. But many wikipedians think it is
unethical to not follow the GNU FDL.
Any individual Wikipedia contributor could sue us,
if we relicense their work under a CC licence without their authorisation.
Such a lawsuit might not get far in a legal sense --
what's the basis for damages, financially speaking? --
but it would generate terrible publicity.
Why terrible publicity. Because it's unethical!
I don't think that contributions should automatically go under the FDL,
since I have objections to the FDL (the nonfree options)
and using a single licence is problematic anyway (for later users).
But if there are people that contributed to Wikipedia
only because it used the GNU FDL specifically and nothing else,
then relicensing their material -- even if we got away with it in practice --
would be a violation of their trust.
Here's my impression of how the license works.
Things
submitted to Wikipedia (and wikibooks) are still owned
by the people who submit them, Wikipedia is just
licensed to use it under the GNU FDL. If all authors
of a particular page (including anons) agree to
relicense the page under, say, the Creative Commons
Share-Alike, the page may be relicenced.
True; and in specific situations, we may want to look into that.
For example, if you want to use any page that I substantially wrote,
my global permissions statement <http://math.ucr.edu/~toby/copyright/>
may allow you to take sentences, paragraphs, sections,
even entire articles in a few cases, to use as you will.
But that
would be stupid and pointless. However, it would be
very useful in wikibooks, as a textbook module might,
for example, use some creative-commons sharealike
licenced things. I'm not sure, but I think that we can
even say "Above this line was licenced under the GNU
FDL, below this line is licenced under the Creative
Commons Sharealike."
Combining the two sides of the line is tricky here;
for the FDL, they'd have to be an "aggregate",
which a single module is unlikely to be.
But we could do such a thing from module to module.
Still, a printed book might have trouble using both types of modules;
some automated checking of this sort of thing would be helpful.
Of course, we may never have any CC modules -- that remains to be seen.
If not, there'll never be any conflicts within Wikimedia;
the benefit of not automatically classifying modules as GNU FDL
would then be to potential users of our material /other/ than Wikimedia.
-- Toby