[Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol

Mon Jul 28 16:12:42 UTC 2008

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 12:05 PM, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 4:57 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The issue of how CC-BY is not compatible with
>> GFDL is a little opaque, to me
>
> The GFDL does not allow relicensing under CC-BY (unless you wrote the
> text entirely yourself). Trying to do so is a copyright violation on
> your part.
>
> Transparent enough now?
> P.S.: Yes, the two licenses are similar in spirit. Just not in legalese.

CC-By isn't even all that similar in spirit. GFDL is copyleft.

You're allowed to take CC-By works, enhance them, then release them
under more restrictive terms.  This can be useful for some things (and
certainly useful to the origination doing the locking up ;) ), but
copyleft licenses prohibit that activity, with the expectation that
doing so will expand the pool of freely licensed works.