On Mon, 9 Jun 2003, Jason Richey wrote:
Why are we so stuck on the GFDL? Are we (as a
community) opposed to
operating under another (though equally free) license that is more
specific about quoutes and such?
Love it or hate it, we're pretty much stuck with it. Since we don't
require contributors to assign copyright of their work to any central
entity, switching licenses would require the permission of everyone who
has contributed material.
With thousands of contributors, many of whom are known only by a transient
network address and plenty of whom may be long gone and uncontactable, it
would be impractical to get such permission for the entire encyclopedia.
Hypothetically one could fork a new Wikipedia base using only material by
people known to have agreed to a license change, but it would be an
enormous amount of work to sort through it, and then you've got to redo
all the stuff that's missing.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)