[Licom-l] More on dual licensing (updating Q&A)

Fri May 29 22:01:21 UTC 2009

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 4:17 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> <snip a lot of good points for discussion>
>
>> * I seem to think that the latest-revision of articles will become
>> CC-SA-only more quickly than most do - 2 years max before that
>
> I am only going to comment on this last bit right now.
>
> How many examples can you think of from the bulk importing of GFDL
> text?  Choose a featured article at random, does it have any
> externally published text in it that is neither fair use nor public
> domain?
<
>
> My expectation is that in 5 years, much less than 10% of Wikipedia
> articles will have been affected by importing CC-BY-SA text.

Interesting.  You could be right.  I don't know about gfdl sources
since we don't ask, but there are many more cc-sa sources than gfdl
sources.

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> The position articulated in discussions at Meta (and Erik please
> correct me if I misstate this), is that:

I believe you state the current published position correctly.  It is
more hands-off than the approach we take to ensuring media uploaded to
commons follows an acceptable free license; or than the approach we
take to affirming that edits to pages are valid GFDL (soon to be
CC-SA-and-GFDL-where-possible) edits.

If we cannot commit to more than this, we should reduce the strength
of dual-licensing claims.   We are misleading most reusers into
thinking that the latest version of Wikipedia will always be available
under the GFDL, when in reality it will become substantially difficult
for a serious reuser to figure out whether any revisions after June 15
are in fact usable in other GFDL contexts.  I don't want to waste lots
of time on this; I just want to have a coherent story for those who
care and a good page describing how to tell whether an article
revision is GFDL / what the last GFDL revision is.

> However, individual communities may choose to go further and provide
> efforts to voluntarily label materials that are CC-BY-SA-only, such as
> through a Category system.

Yes, or better still through a change to the edit page that allows
form-based classification, by category or otherwise.  Commons
licensing was a mess until this was insituted.

SJ