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History of Wikipedia commentary/SJKs Wikipedia-Specific License proposal|
Do we really need to not use the GFDL or the GPL? The GFDL is definitely primarily for stuff that's printed. I actually think it's not such a bad idea that we use the license. The problems with the GFDL: a) Authorship issue. GFDL assumes authors, Wikipedia essentially doesn't. As long as Wikipedia gives some definition of "principal authors" we'll be fine. I see two options: # Preserve all diff records so that at least for individual articles, the principal authors can be defined in some way # State that the author of Wikipedia content shall be "The Wikipedians" or "The Internet community" or "The World" or simply "collective/no author/unknown/various". I prefer the non-branded versions, but it's not a strong preference. In fact, it would be cool if 2-5-25 years from now there are all these reference works that have a "by the Wikipedians" byline. b) Unclear about internet reuse. Possible resolutions: # Don't use the optional features. [1] That makes life easy. # Work with the FSF to figure out what the internet equivalents of Cover Texts and Invariant Sections are. My thinking is that if we do this right, the FSF might want to release an updated version of the license to make these issues more clear. Since it is reasonable to assume that Wikipedia (or at least parts of Wikipedia) will be published in book form at some point, it does make sense to use the GFDL instead of the GPL. But unless we go with "Don't use the optional features" (and I say, why not?) we should work with the FSF to figure out how to interpret the license, and either # Explain our interpretation of the license, but leave it as an interpretation, or # Modify the license, hopefully as a new official version of the GFDL --TheCunctator |