GFDL / CC by-sa compatibility

I have to confess that I am not following this discussion closely. I 
apologize pre-emptively. :-(

But I just wanted to remind you of four things in case it helps to reach a 
better conclusion.

1. US creative commons licenses explicitly say that it is based on US law. 
There are non-US CC licenses under development - Finland, Brazil probably 
have finished already. Japanese CC licenses are in the polishing stage, and 
similar efforts are happening elsewhere. I am wondering what the 
impliactions of thi is, especially if you are not discussing dual-licensing 
English wikipedia contents only with GFDL and US CC-by-sa ver.1, but the 
whole wikipedia contents.

2. US Creative Commons licenses does not seem to include a term insuring 
forward compatibility. That is, if a content is used under CC-by-sa ver.1, 
then there seems to be no guarantee that the same content could be used 
under CC-by-sa ver.1.1 or any later version. As you know, there is such a 
line in GFDL, and it seems that it is a major source of hope for those who 
think GFDL is not suited or too restrictive for Wikipedia.

If dual licensing will be introduced, I hope there is a room for future 
changes as CC licenses change.

3. I think there is still unclarity (at least to me) what is the unit of 
"work" or "document" as defined in GFDL. Is it the whole wikipedia written 
in more than 50 languages? Or is it jsut one artcile? Or individual 
language-wikipedia? I think there is a merit to take the first and second 
position (both if possible), but not sure about others.

4. Some articles have incomplete history, I suppose. Some contents are 
merged from somewhere else, some contents are split from another page, etc. 
So getting permissions from all previous contributors could involve a bit of 
detective work. I guess it is still doable with patience in many cases, 
though.


Well, what I am doing might be what Japanese call "preaching Buddha," - 
trying to teach an expert what he already knows. Pardon me in that case.


Regards,

Tomos

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