[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

Tue Feb 3 18:35:08 UTC 2009

2009/2/3 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
> Where can I read about what, exactly, the spirit of the GFDL is?

Start with the license preamble "Secondarily, this License preserves
for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work,"

Now remember despite claims to the country the GFDL is basically
thinking about printed books. The wording is such that you would have
to include the required credit in a printed form with the book.

So effectively the spirit is that the credit stays with the work. So
if the work is on a website the credit should be on that website. If
the work is on a T-shirt the credit should distributed with the
T-shirt perhaps as part of the packaging (of course things get a bit
tricky when someone wears the t-shirt but that is a secondary
problem).

> I've already explained why flexible attribution is equivalent to full
> attribution in a recent post. It's easy to do the reverse lookup from a
> piece of content to its authors. Anyone wanting to know who the content
> should be attributed can easily find that out. We can develop tools to make
> it easier.

Not really. Without using admin powers who is the author of the work
"the Wounded Records wikipedia article"?

> But back to your spirit argument. Why would a CC-Wiki that is more practical
> about attribution be against the spirit of the GFDL?

Calling effective removal "practical" doesn't actually change the situation.

-- 
geni