GNU FDL changes

David Gerard dgerard at gmail.com
Sun Dec 2 21:43:12 UTC 2007


On 02/12/2007, Noah Slater <nslater at bytesexual.org> wrote:
> On 02/12/2007, Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> wrote:

> > | And so this is not, as some people speculated on Facebook, my 50th
> > | birthday party, this is the party to celebrate the libration of
> > | Wikipedia.

> I find this sentence quite objectionable, as if the GFDL shackles Wikipedia.


It certainly shackles its reuse. You can't reuse an article safely
without attaching the entire GFDL. A license which required reusers to
attach a 100kg weight to each copy would technically be "free" but
also pretty clearly be seriously problematic in practice. You can more
or less comply with the GFDL on the web (make the license a link on
the same site) or in a book (reprint it at the end), but other print
reuses are pretty much impossible. It's a license for software
manuals, not for short pages written on a wiki. If CC-by-sa had
existed when Nupedia had started, Wikipedia would be using that.


- d.



More information about the Discussion mailing list