[Licom-l] a question about GFDL-only material

Fri Apr 3 16:17:09 UTC 2009

In our Question and Answers we explain that "merging in GFDL-only text
will not be possible" from now on since we want all our articles
available under CC-BY-SA (and the relicensing clause is only valid for
material added before Nov 2008). I'm not sure I understand then, why
we are still allowing GFDL-only media. Isn't the whole reason that
people want to use GFDL for images because it's a "strong copyleft"?
Doesn't that mean that any article that includes GFDL-only images
cannot then be reused under CC-BY-SA. And if so, doesn't that
contradict our new license statement? In fact, if you classify
Wikipedia as a "combined work" rather than a "collection", it would
invalidate the dual licensing for the entire encyclopedia. If we are
going to allow two different copyleft licenses (with all the pitfalls
that entails), we obviously have to chose one as the preferred license
and only allow the other if it is dual-licensed. Otherwise parts of
the project become incompatible with other parts. How then can we
continue to use GFDL-only media?

My apologies if this has already been hashed out already. Also, I
realize it's a little late to be asking this question, but after
reading through the Q&A again I just couldn't wrap my head around this
problem.

Ryan Kaldari