[Textbook-l] RE: Anonymous contributions

Tue Aug 5 18:56:15 UTC 2003

Alex756 wrote:
>It is ironic that these various licenses are 
>incompatible with each other, maybe a simpler 
>solution would be to have a very straightforward
>license like has been used commonly in areas where 
>non-exclusive licensing is a commercial reality 
>and just make sure that attribution is preserved 
>(sort of like the moral rights approach of European
>copyright) isn't that what we all really want when 
>we talk about open content?

You are asking the wrong question since we want our
content to be free, not just open. I, at least, get a
very positive feeling from knowing that everything I
write will be free forever. If all we required was
attribution then a proprietary encyclopedia could take
our work, improve upon it, sell it as a proprietary
work and we would not be able to build upon their
improvements; the chain of positive feedback would be
broken. 

But the GFDL does have some serious problems compared
with the Creative Commons Share Alike Licence (such as
onerous compliance measures that we don't even bother
to enforce on downstream users; such as having
transparent copies, distribution of the whole GFDL
license with each copy and a changelog). However, we
are stuck with the GFDL because that was the best
option available when Wikipedia started. So, IMO, we
should keep things simple by having just one license
for all Wikimedia projects and we should work with the
GNU people to create a GFDL 2.0 which is compatible
with CCSA (and then work with the CC people to make a
CCSA 2.0 that is compatible with GFDL 2.0 or later).
We can't ignore the huge resource of free content that
is already in our own family - Wikipedia. 

But I would still like to know if we could require all
new submissions to be more flexibly licensed so that
Wikimedia could re-license the text under one of
several copyleft licenses. We still, officially, would
be a GFDL shop but downstream users could ask the
Foundation about re-licencing selected Wikimedia works
under other copyleft licenses (of course this would
only be for content submitted after a certain date and
any content by users who explicitly agree to let
Wikimedia re-license their work under other copyleft
licenses - I'm sure there will be plenty of those).
This, IMO, would be an acceptable (but not ideal)
situation until the GNU and CC people get their act
together.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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