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

Fri Apr 3 16:20:35 UTC 2009

Substitute "aggregation" for "collection" below. BTW, which is
Wikipedia actually considered? A "combined work" or an "aggregation"
(under the GFDL)?

Ryan Kaldari

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 11:17 AM, Ryan Kaldari <kaldari at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>