[Wikipedia-l] Marketing: a question

Wed Jul 12 11:05:02 UTC 2006

On 12/07/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can an individual organisation such as Wikimedia change their
> requirements, despite the license, to something more lenient as you
> are suggesting? Even if they did, could some external
> organisation/person have a problem with it? Could the Free Software
> Foundation claim that we're misusing the GFDL? If they did, could they
> demand we use a different license (I think not, but I'll ask anyway)?
> Well, I'm just speculating, but they're questions that should be
> considered.

Wikimedia can't change the license requirements to something more
lenient (a hypothetical soft-GFDL, or CC-BY, or something), because
only the copyright holder can relicense material they've released
under a given license.

And the copyright holders are the *authors*, not Wikimedia. Of course,
if the specific authors are willing to dual-license their work as
something else, you're sorted, and it may well be doable to manage
this for the bulk of the articles on a small wiki with only a few
active contributors... but it's a hack.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk