[Foundation-l] Projects without >FDL1.2 migration clause

Thu Apr 10 08:53:10 UTC 2008

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> On 4/7/08, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>   
>> Milos Rancic wrote:
>>     
>>> There are a couple of more really bad possibilities in that way, which
>>> raises the question: Does anyone really think about the possibility
>>> for really bad consequences?
>>>       
>> Yes, I think a lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about the
>> possibility of really bad consequences.  That's why we are doing things
>> so carefully and with full open discussion of the right way forward.
>>     
> I think this is quite right as a case of securing our butts, but even
> if we can't trust the law to be our friend, let's not lose sight of the
> fact that suing wikipedia would be very close to (to use a Budweiser
> analogy) suing cute puppy dogs.
>   

That's probably true, but the whole point of free content is to make it 
so other people can reuse it (otherwise why bother with the license?), 
and not all of our potential reusers are as hard to sue as we are. So to 
be a useful free-content resource it really has to be done carefully in 
as clear and air-tight a way as possible.

Of course, the current situation is so bad that the English Wikipedia 
copyrights page at [[en:Wikipedia:Copyrights]] explicitly disclaims 
knowing what it would mean for a reuser to follow our license, and 
instead offers a few alternate possibilities with no guarantee. So if a 
license migration is done carefully it should certainly result in a 
better situation than the current one.

-Mark