Re: Dual-licensed wikibooks

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 8:17 PM, darklama <[email protected]> wrote:
> I think before Wikibooks goes jumping head first into outright accepting
> dual licensed books, Wikibooks first needs to as a project find
> solutions to its current problems:
>
> 1. People are left hanging when it comes to what they need to do in
> order to be in compliance with the GFDL. This requires people to be
> experts in GFDL compliance.

I agree, and maybe it's worth our while to write up either an FAQ page
about the GFDL, or shooting higher we could create an entire book
about the GFDL. This would be an excellent opportunity to form some
kind of working partnership with the FSF, or some other free content
organization. Such a partnership and such a resource would help drive
more traffic to Wikibooks. We could also see if groups like the FSF
have any content on the issue already that they would be willing to
make a donation of. Again, there is good advertising potential in
this.

> 2. People are left to figure out what licenses images and other media
> use, or if public domain or fair use is being used, and what that means
> for there reuse, assuming people are even aware that other
> considerations are necessary when reusing those parts of a book.

Agreed, the situation is already sticky enough because of
multi-licensed images. I've experimented in the past with creating PDF
versions and print versions of books that include licensing
information about images in the book. This, to make a long story
short, is very difficult, tedious, time-consuming manual work. I would
love to see a technical solution implemented where image licensing
information was automatically included in a generated print or PDF
version. With the PDF extension in betatesting currently, this is the
kind of feature we should be requesting en masse.

> 3. People are left on their own when it comes to any legal ramifications
> that might steam from getting any of this wrong, reducing the likelihood
> that Wikibooks content will be reused, redistributed, and modified
> outside of Wikibooks, except by the most savvy of users.

Herein lies the largest problem, I think, and the biggest impetus for
us adopting a more flexible licensing scheme. We benefit internally
from GFDL-consistency, but outside the WMF cloak the GFDL is not a
particularly popular license for written content. Unfortunately we
have thousands of books and sheer momentum dictates that we have to
stay with the GFDL, at least as the primary license. This might be
good reason for us to start putting pressure on the WMF, FSF, and CC
to work on license interoperability issues.

> I think Wikibooks needs to solve these problems before even considering
> trying to tackle dual licensed books and how to make it work, instead of
> ignoring the current problems.

I would welcome a change in licensing policies if we could do it in a
manner that was consistent in terms of implementation and legality. We
obviously can't just change the license terms on existing books. I
don't agree with any solution that is hacked together, tacked on after
the fact, or handled haphazardly. Telling our authors that they can
select arbitrary sets of licenses for their book, so long as they post
disclaimers everywhere is very haphazard and is a poor implementation
of this goal we seem to share.

--Andrew Whitworth