[WikiEN-l] Wikilists and GDFL

Tue Sep 30 05:37:39 UTC 2003

On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 21:23, Alex T. wrote:
[a whole bunch of stuff]

Alex, every version of every page that has been released under the FDL
through this project *has been released under the FDL*. It can be
redistributed by anyone who received it under that license, and
Wikipedia's servers continue to redistribute them under that license as
part of Wikipedia.

It is the very essence of what we're trying to do that material from the
project can be reused and redistributed under that same free license. To
claim that this should be taken away after another revision has been
made is to pervert the system, to demolish the community editing system,
to strangle the right to fork, to pull the rug of liberty from under the
feet of reuse.

In short, I can only assume we're misunderstanding each other badly,
because I can't believe anyone would try to make the argument that
legitimately edited, publically released, FDL-licensed past revisions
are no longer redistributable under the terms of the license that they
have been released to the world under. That would be to argue against
everything this project stands for.

The arguments about it being _unfair_ to later contributors to not use
their work don't make any sense to me, and appear to explicitly reject
what the project's use of the FDL license explicitly embraces: the
ability to reuse and if desired separately develop free encyclopedia
materials under a free license.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)