[Foundation-l] GFDL 1.3 Release

Mon Nov 3 22:14:00 UTC 2008

2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
> What's the plan for making a final decision? There will probably be
> too many people involved to ever achieve anything close to a
> consensus. Are you planning a referendum?

Yes. Note that the Board resolution on re-licensing specifically
referred to a vote as a decision-making tool.

>> It will be the obligation of re-users to validate whether an article
>> includes CC-BY-SA-only changes -- dual licensing should not
>> be a burden on editors. This is also not intended to be bidirectional,
>> i.e., merging in GFDL-only text will not be possible.

> How will that work? If the terms of service have been modified, how
> does one upload CC-BY-SA only content without agreeing to those terms
> of service?

We'll just have to find a good wording, e.g. one that requires
dual-licensing of CC-BA-SA works contributed by the copyright holder.

> There needs to be some way for re-users to know what
> license things are under, you can't just leave it to them since it's
> impossible for them to find out if it doesn't say anywhere.

Any CC-BY-SA import from an external source requires attribution, so
we may use this as an opportunity to standardize how we want to
attribute externally imported content. However, I think we need to
keep the obligations absolutely minimal: an author should not have to
understand the meaning of dual-licensing in order to be able to import
CC-BY-SA-only content.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate