GFDL 1.3

[Alex Hudson]

Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
> Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com> writes:
>   
>> In previous drafts I saw, there was an idea of being able to relicense 
>> to a "GNU Wiki License" which would have presumably been CC-BY-SA 
>> compatible without needing to relicense to that license[...]
>>     
> It's possible that after trying, they decided that licence compatibility was
> impossible.
>   

That seems pretty speculative. To quote Yoda, it's do or do not - there 
is no "try", just the willingness to make the changes. It seems to me 
that the only stumbling block is the removal of incompatible 
restrictions in the FDL.

> I'm also not sure if licence compatibility can be open-ended.  If the
> hypothetical GNU Wiki License was compatible with cc-by-sa-3.0, then the
> window of compatibility would close when cc-by-sa was changed in an
> incompatible way.

Even in that scenario, it could be fixed with an updated license invoked 
via the "or later.." clause, again assuming that the willingness was 
there (& the change on the other side was something we were happy 
with).  That's no different a situation to (e.g.) GPLv3 and the Apache 
v2 licenses.

I admire your willingness to attempt to hypothesise about reasons this 
could be a good thing or the only solution, but it still boils down to 
the fact that "or later.." is being used to relicense works to CC-BY-SA 
without the original author's permission. "Or later..." is supposed to 
be used to update licenses to reflect the same spirit but respond to 
modern needs. Introducing the possibility of an irreconcilable fork 
doesn't seem to me to be in the same spirit.

Cheers,

Alex.