[WikiEN-l] licenses

Sat Jul 12 18:31:52 UTC 2003

Karl Wick wrote:
> Could Wikipedia just decide to change all of its content
> from one license to another ? 

No, we can't do that.  Wikipedia does not own the copyrights for most
of the content in the Wikipedia.  We merely license it from the
original authors, who have released it to us under the GNU FDL.

The Wikimedia Foundation formally owns the copyrights to all my edits,
and the edits of people who edited Wikipedia while in my employ at
Bomis (subject to some caveats, i.e. Larry's Philosophy Text is owned
by him, not being written for hire by me).

> Is it legally or otherwise bound to continue with the GNU license ?
> Is there a danger of later legal challenges of this ? From whom ?
> What if we give anyone the option to go back thru and rescind any
> work that they contributed if we changed to a Creative Commons
> license ?

No, we can't do that.  It'd be deeply offensive to a lot of people,
and legally wrong.

If we could round up consent from everyone who has written portions of
existing articles, then, yes, we could change the license.  But at
this point, with many thousands of contributors, many of whom we can't
find, that'd be impossible.

--Jimbo