Mailing List Archive

The reasoning given in the FAQ for adopting a passed deadline makes sense,
and while some may disagree that it was necessary it certainly isn't
"absurd." Let's wait a little while longer before declaring the terms of the
license to be a disaster, especially since "first to the mark" with
criticism doesn't correlate with expertise.

Nathan


On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:54 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>wrote:

> 2008/11/3 Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org>:
> > 2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>:
> >> Ok, that's marginally better. We don't need to delete everything
> >> posted in the past 2 days (and the subsequent time until we decide
> >> whether or not to switch) we just have to scour through it all and
> >> delete those parts that weren't originally posted to whatever project
> >> you're on - that includes anything transwikied and anything
> >> translated.
> >
> > No. Please re-read the "eligible for licensing" section and the
> > definition of an "MMC Site". Wikipedia.org can clearly be considered a
> > single "MMC Site". This doesn't require interpreting all of Wikipedia
> > as a single work. Notice that even the definition of MMC uses the word
> > "works".
>
> Ok, so the extent of the problem is reducing, but there are still
> going to be things added between the deadline and whenever we decide
> to switch (assuming we do switch, that isn't definite). It's nothing
> short of absurd to have the deadline two days before the license was
> released. I told you it was important to run a draft by the community
> before releasing the final copy, this is exactly what I was talking
> about.
>
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2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>:
> It's nothing short of absurd to have the deadline two days before the
> license was released.

Not at all. It's a deliberate design decision to make it impossible to
bulk-import and relicense other people's FDL works, e.g. FDL-licensed
software manuals, while not affecting legitimate transactions that
have happened prior to the relicensing window of opportunity.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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

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2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>:
> Ok, so the extent of the problem is reducing, but there are still
> going to be things added between the deadline and whenever we decide
> to switch (assuming we do switch, that isn't definite). It's nothing
> short of absurd to have the deadline two days before the license was
> released. I told you it was important to run a draft by the community
> before releasing the final copy, this is exactly what I was talking
> about.

It's a problem we can deal with in much the same way as any copyvio
issue. This days we are bringing in very little off wiki text so it is
unlikely to present a significant issue.

Images are more of a problem both in terms of the question of if we
have prominent tools to edit them and the issue that we will need to
kill off the GFDL 1.2 exclusive images (although we always knew that
would happen).

--
geni

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2008/11/3 Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org>:
> 2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>:
>> It's nothing short of absurd to have the deadline two days before the
>> license was released.
>
> Not at all. It's a deliberate design decision to make it impossible to
> bulk-import and relicense other people's FDL works, e.g. FDL-licensed
> software manuals, while not affecting legitimate transactions that
> have happened prior to the relicensing window of opportunity.

That argument works if the deadline were today, it doesn't justify
having it 2 days ago. If the deadline was today and this had been
announced properly telling everyone to stop including content from
elsewhere in our projects, we wouldn't have a problem. As it is, we
have 2 days in which there was no way we could have done anything, and
the only announcement we got from someone that happened to see the new
version and post here and then it was up to us to realise the
consequences.

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2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>:
> That argument works if the deadline were today, it doesn't justify
> having it 2 days ago.

To avoid confusion about timezones, it's better to date it clearly in
the past. I don't see that it has significant impact.

> As it is, we
> have 2 days in which there was no way we could have done anything,

It's not clear to me that anything needs to be done. Even the
relicensing of transwiki copy operations within Wikimedia is IMO
clearly in the spirit of the license. There will probably be a small
set of copy operations affected by this, e.g. copying material from
Wikia into a Wikimedia wikis, but we will have to deal with that
regardless of the deadline.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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

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2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>:

> the only announcement we got from someone that happened to see the new
> version and post here and then it was up to us to realise the
> consequences.

Implying that we wouldn't have been told seems a little unfair - Petr
said himself that he stumbled across it at the exact moment it went
live. I'm sure there was a notification in the works, it just got
pre-empted...

--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk

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2008/11/3 Andrew Gray <shimgray@gmail.com>:
> 2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>:
>
>> the only announcement we got from someone that happened to see the new
>> version and post here and then it was up to us to realise the
>> consequences.
>
> Implying that we wouldn't have been told seems a little unfair - Petr
> said himself that he stumbled across it at the exact moment it went
> live. I'm sure there was a notification in the works, it just got
> pre-empted...

I'm sure we would have been told, but since the deadline had already
past we needed to be told as soon as possible. In fact, ideally we
would have been told 2 days ago to stop including content from
elsewhere.

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2008/11/3 Bence Damokos <bdamokos@gmail.com>:
> In the FAQ there is a short explanation of the changes:
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html

This FAQ has now been updated to correct the error regarding the date clause.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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

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On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:16 AM, Michael Bimmler <mbimmler@gmail.com> wrote:
> The work must have been added to a public wiki (or some other
> kind of web site where the general public could review and edit the
> materials) before November 1, 2008.
>
> All FDL-covered material added to Wikipedia before November 1, 2008
> satisfies these conditions.$
>
> --
> What...extraordinary timing. Only 3 days worth of work lost...

Nope, no work lost. Look at the passage again:

"An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this
License, and if all works that were first published under this License
somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole
or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections,
and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008."

The only work that couldn't be relicensed is work that was GFDL but
not on the wiki prior to November 1st. Work that is on the wiki is
able to be transferred at any time prior to August 2009.

1) Work that is created or edited on the wiki at any time can be transferred
2) Work that was released under the GFDL, but wasn't on an MMC prior
to November 1st 2008 cannot be transferred.
3) Work that was released under the GFDL, and was on an MMC prior to
November 1st can be transferred

So the only work that we can't transfer to CC-BY-SA is GFDL work from
elsewhere on the internet that is being moved to a wiki. We don't lose
any work that our volunteers are creating on the wiki, we only lose
the ability to reuse GFDL'd content from other non-MMC websites that
isn't already duplicated on the wiki.

--Andrew Whitworth

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2008/11/3 Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111@gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:16 AM, Michael Bimmler <mbimmler@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The work must have been added to a public wiki (or some other
>> kind of web site where the general public could review and edit the
>> materials) before November 1, 2008.
>>
>> All FDL-covered material added to Wikipedia before November 1, 2008
>> satisfies these conditions.$
>>
>> --
>> What...extraordinary timing. Only 3 days worth of work lost...
>
> Nope, no work lost. Look at the passage again:

You're a little late, we resolved that confusion several hours ago (it
was caused by an incorrect FAQ which has now been corrected).

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