[Foundation-l] Copyright issues of wikimedia projects

Mon Jun 7 21:57:11 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer (maveric149) wrote in part:

>The FDL was very deliberately written to work well for free software
>documentation, manulals and textbooks. Its use for non-text-based content was
>not forseen - yet that is the situation we are faced with.

Is that really the central issue of what we're faced with?
Even Wikipedia's text articles are not documentation,
which is why the GNU FDL doesn't fit in seemlessly with them.

Actually, I don't believe that the FDL was written for textbooks,
which IMO are more like encyclopaedia articles than manuals
(although arguably they really fit in the middle somewhere).
Judging by how its written and the GNU material about it,
it seems to me that textbooks were an afterthought.
For that matter, so were encyclopaedia articles. ^_^

Of course, you're correct that the FDL wasn't intended for sound and images,
which is why it fits even ''less'' seemlessly with those.

>Delirium wrote:

>>I certainly don't see Wikimedia as producing "content".

>What do you call images, sound, and video then? They are not documents.

Sure, they're documents.  But they're not ''documentation'',
which is the "D" in "FDL".  I agree that the situation is unclear,
since the meaning of the term "document" is arguable.
But so is the meaning of the term "content", if it comes to that.

>'Media' *might* work but has some ambiguity issues. 'Publication' might also
>work. 'Copyleft' would be redundant. Any other ideas?

I wouldn't worry very much about the best name,
except that we need something that GNU would like
if we want GNU to create a new licence for us.
I'd say that "document" is ideal in theory,
but for a practically useful name,
this would depend on how the new GNU licence is created.

If the GNU FDL is modified to be more like what we want,
in part by generalising it to more documents than just documentation,
then GNU could change its name to "Free Document License"
without changing the initials, like they did to the GNU LGPL.
But the general impression seems to be that GNU won't want to do this.

If a new licence (like what mav calls the "GNU FCL" is created),
then it would be confusing to name it "Free Document License",
because of the initials.  Given GNU's "semantic hangup" about "content",
I'd say that "publication" is the best term, so we get "GNU FPL".
(But even this initialism may look too much like "GNU GPL".)

-- Toby