[Wikipedia-l] The GNU LFDL idea (was Re: Controversial user nicknames)

Wed Aug 27 22:14:15 UTC 2003

Cross post with Wikipedia-l (please respond there)

Delirium wrote:
>I think this whole thing is unfortunate though, 
>and it's becoming increasingly clear that the 
>GFDL exactly as written isn't *really* what 
>we want to do.  I think most Wikipedians would 
>be happier with a license that required Wikipedia 
>to be credited rather than five authors.  As it 
>stands now, the republisher *has* to credit five 
>authors, but does *not* have to credit Wikipedia 
>at all.  They could give it their own name and 
>not mention its connection to us at all, as long 
>as they list the authors properly.  I think most 
>of us would prefer the opposite -- that they be 
>required to credit Wikipedia, and not be required 
>to credit the individual authors.  But this would 
>require a license change, which may be impossible 
>at this point.

1) This is more appropriate for Wikipedia-L
2) On Textbook-L we are already talking about
persuading the GNU people make a FDL 2.0 that states
that anything licensed under the GNU FDL 2.0 or later
that does /not/ have invariant sections or cover
texts, can also be licensed under a "GNU LFDL" which
would be written more along the lines of the Creative
Commons Attribution Share Alike License (and the LFDL
would also explicitly state that any LFDL text can be
used under the CC-Att/SA, the GNU FDL 2.0 or later or,
of course, the LFDL). The idea is to dump the GNU FDL
and its problems and relicense all Wikimedia content
under the less restrictive and less complex LFDL. See
the archives: Look for the "wikiversity licensing"
thread at
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2003-August/subject.html#start

Which reminds me again; we really need a Wikimedia-l
mailing list to talk about these types of
Wikimedia-wide issues and also discus new project
ideas like Wikiversity.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

See also:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/legalcode
(a copyleft content license)

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