On 02/12/2007, Noah Slater nslater@bytesexual.org wrote:
On 02/12/2007, Florian Weimer fw@deneb.enyo.de wrote:
| And so this is not, as some people speculated on Facebook, my 50th | birthday party, this is the party to celebrate the libration of | Wikipedia.
I find this sentence quite objectionable, as if the GFDL shackles Wikipedia.
It certainly shackles its reuse. You can't reuse an article safely without attaching the entire GFDL. A license which required reusers to attach a 100kg weight to each copy would technically be "free" but also pretty clearly be seriously problematic in practice. You can more or less comply with the GFDL on the web (make the license a link on the same site) or in a book (reprint it at the end), but other print reuses are pretty much impossible. It's a license for software manuals, not for short pages written on a wiki. If CC-by-sa had existed when Nupedia had started, Wikipedia would be using that.
- d.