Wouter Vanden Hove wrote: This is something I'd like a lawyer, or at least someone familiar with copyright law (perhaps Alex?) to clear up: are attribution-style licenses compatible with the GFDL as used by Wikipedia? My understanding is that there might be a technical problem, because attribution-style licenses require attribution of the original author, while the GFDL only requires attribution of five principal authors. If there are more than 5 principal authors, the GFDL would permit you to omit some of them; you could then choose to omit the original author (if perhaps the original author's relative contribution is now not the major part of the article), but this would be a violation of the original attribution license. So it would seem that in some cases at least attribution-type licenses impose additional requirements above those imposed by the GFDL, which could be a problem. Not a *major* problem really, but a technical one that I'm not sure how to solve. Comments from someone with more knowlege of copyright law? This is important to resolve, because it's come up several times before (on the village pump, for example), and there are quite a few attribution-type licenses that all are fairly similar to each other. -Mark

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Wouter Vanden Hove wrote: As far as I know, this is not true. Creative Commons only allows spreading under the same license, not with more or less rights. Since the GNU/FDL is not the same license, it is not allowed to go from CC to GNU/FDL - or vice versa. I'd love it if someone proved me wrong, and either showed that there is a loophole (intended or unintended) that can be used and/or could get the "those licenses require basically the same things but in different wording, so no harm is done by cross-licensing" argument into something that would be juridically valid. Andre Engels