[Foundation-l] Copyright issues of wikimedia projects

Sun May 30 04:54:47 UTC 2004

 --- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote: 
> There is a tremendously important reason why all our
> text-based projects should
> be under the same (or at least compatible) license:
> To alow inter-project
> copying. It would be absurd to not be able to copy
> text back and forth between
> Wikibooks and Wikipedia, for example. 

There may be situations where using a different
license would be provide more advantages than the
possibility of copying between projects would. As Erik
has already mentioned, a Wikinews project is far less
likely to be successful if bound by the GFDL. Another
example is Wikitravel, who have already decided that
the GFDL is unsuitable for a travel guide. I expect
there are many more examples where having to include a
full copy of the GFDL would provide a major
disincentive to re-users of our content. Having one
license across all projects makes it easier for
editors, but it certainly is not always going to be
the best option for re-users. We need to consider both
when making licensing decisions.

Fixing the GFDL would be a perfect solution, but until
that happens, I don't think we should rule out the
possibility that future projects should be allowed to
take an alternative route. 

Angela.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angela

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