On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:58 PM, geni <geni...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm not talking about needs I'm talking about legal rights. > > Remember you can't use presumed consent in this situation so if you > wanted to shift the credit to wikipedia you would need to track down > and get agreement from every author (and whoever inherited in the > cases where they have died). Given the amount of content we have from very > occasional contributers this is impossible.
Nothing's impossible - where there's a will (and clearly there is[1]) there's a way. Mozilla managed to relicense to GPL years ago[2] (they had an FAQ too[3]) and there's long been talk about moving the Linux kernel from GPLv2 to GPLv3[4]. These moves are not easy and can be made significantly more difficult by individuals (like yourself) working against the spirit of the community. As Mozilla said in the FAQ, "by doing so you will make [the work] useful to more people, which may result in others improving [the work] to make it more useful to you", before going on to explain that the 'spirit' of the new license was in line with that of the old. The key difference is that they had only 450 contributors and the vast majority were contactable. We have orders of magnitude more contributors, many of whom are anonymous, aliased and/or without contact details. The best we can do in this case is contact those who we can, notify those who connect to the site and publish a notice of our intentions. So let's get this show on the road... there's been more than enough compelling debate, academic wankery and downright noise already. Those who are so concerned about the opinion others hold of them and feel their right to self-aggrandisement is being trampled on can identify themselves (and their edits) so as the rest of us can get on with doing what we set out to do - building the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Sam 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Transition_to_CC-BY-SA#Discussion 2. http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4155 3. http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html 4. http://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/about_gplv3_can_the_linux_kernel_relicense _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l