discuss: Re: Linuxquestions.org wiki - Jeff's IPv6 article
Subject:
Re: Re: Linuxquestions.org wiki - Jeff's IPv6 article
From:
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Date:
4 Sep 2004 16:39:31 -0000
Message-Id: <3a5ama$7gnf9m@mxip05a.cluster1.charter.net>
> On 09/04/2004 01:18:38 AM, Dan Marshall wrote:
> > it's a bit of a torment to see all this material out there and not
> > being able to use it - especially since the authors have already
> > expressed an interest in libre documentation.
>
> But the GFDL allows you to freely modify a document without the user's
> permission providing you reference the original author and publish the
> modifications under the same license with invariant sections intact.
>
> In fact, you can probably already publish any GFDL licensed document as
> an 'aggregate,' combined with information published under a different
> license (such as CC), as long as you are clear which license applies to
> which part.
>
> I published all my documents with the 'no Invariant Sections, no Front-
> Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts' option intact, so theoretically
> you could butcher them however you wish as long as you keep my name
> referenced and the GFDL attached.
We could - if we weren't already under the Creative Commons. Without copyright holder approval, Creative Commons (or at least the variant we use) material can't be released under the GFDL, and GFDL material can't be released under the Creative Commons. Sometimes copyleft works a little *too* well.
In theory, we could place just the article based on a GFDL work under the GFDL. But then we couldn't reuse material in existing articles in the new article, or reuse material from the new article in other, Creative Commons-based, articles. There is just to much chance of copyright violation. We have enough trouble convincing new contributors not to copy-and-paste from project homepages! Or from the Wikipedia.
The wiki's cvs doesn't allow tracking of ownership any finer than article level. We do have a "page history" function, but it is based on the diff tool, and is little better than a good guess.
Migrating to GFDL, while opening up a lot of existing material to us, would mean starting over from scratch. Contributors still hold copyright over their material, and only license it to us under the terms of the Creative Commons.
In short, we're stuck with asking for explicit permission or rolling our own.
