[Licom-l] Removing GFDL 1.2-only images from wikipedia articles

Fri May 22 19:30:46 UTC 2009

2009/5/22 Ryan Kaldari <kaldari at gmail.com>:
> Once our licensing terms are updated to allow dual-license reuse (with
> cc-by-sa being the default), will we need to remove GFDL 1.2-only
> images from Wikipedia articles? Since GFDL 1.2 is a strong copyleft
> license and it seems reasonable to consider a single Wikipedia article
> to be a "combined work" or "collection" rather than an "aggregation of
> independent works", GFDL 1.2 is thus incompatible with cc-by-sa, and
> you cannot dual-license such an article.

The GFDL and CC-BY-SA language on copyleft, in spite of what different
proponents may say, is substantially identical. So to the extent there
is a problem with mixing licenses, it wouldn't only affect GFDL 1.2
works with CC-BY-SA works - it would also affect other-licensed works
with CC-BY-SA works. One way out of it is to interpret all those
licenses as weak copyleft: my preference would be to work towards an
explicit and clear approach to strong copyleft that allows for mixing
with other free content licenses.

I think there are very good reasons to talk about GFDL 1.2-only being
an inappropriate license for media, but that's a community discussion
that needs to take its time.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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