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

Fri May 22 20:17:52 UTC 2009

Unfortunately, it seems the wording of the GFDL license is so vague it
is very difficult to tell under what circumstances it would be a
strong copyleft (apart from obvious derivatives). It seems to me that
everyone just interprets the GFDL license according to whatever they
want it to say. The people who use GFDL 1.2 as a de facto
non-commercial license tend to say that it is a strong copyleft. The
people who want to freely mix GFDL and other licenses say it isn't. Of
course it all depends on how you define the terms "modified work",
"adaptation", "combined work", "collection", and "aggregation of
independent works". Luckily, the wording in cc-by-sa is much clearer.
cc-by-sa explicitly defines an encyclopedia as a "collection" and says
that "share alike" doesn't have to apply to collections (as they are
not "adaptations").

If the consensus is that no one really knows under what circumstances
GFDL is a strong copyleft, I'll just leave the matter alone for now.

Ryan Kaldari

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Huib Laurens
<Abigor at forgotten-beauty.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I want to start that I am sorry that you needed to miss me for a week
> almost 2. I wasn't feeling that good and wasn't online that much.
>
> <ontopicmode>
> I think the license on the image isn't important for the cc-by-sa
> license.. The images has its own license..
> As far as I know it is possible to place a gfdl images in a website that
> is all rights reserverd if you do it correct with the license and author
> and .....  So why should it be a problem for our articles?
>
> Best regards,
> Huib
>
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