User:Slaunger/Sandbox/Draft

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Hi Peter, I am back again. Here is my reply. Your explanations does not make me change my mind. The reasons are:

which is after you made the license change. Thus, it is perhaps understandable that you did that license change back then, but since it is now explicitly stated in the policy that the licenses must be perpetual and not be revoked it is clear for me that your license change of images uploaded prior to January 30, 2009 is in violation of current Commons policy.
It is my impression that it has been added explicitly partly as a spin-off of our initial discussions, to make it absolutely clear although it is already implied by the license texts alone. No one has questioned that policy change since its addition, so I (now) consider it as a stable and uncontroversial part of current Commons policy.
  • GFDL 1.3 was released on November 3, 2008, and on that same date the equivalent license template on Commons {{GFDL-1.3}} was created. That implies that as of January 2009, when you changed the GFDL 1.2 or later into GFDL 1.2 only, you were effectively changing a GFDL 1.2, or 1.3 or later into GFDL 1.2 only. You were effectively retracting an existing GFDL 1.3 license and also eliminated the and later in violation with the clause 10 of the GFDL 1.2. So it is not true that your license change back then did not mean a real change.
  • You claim that you have not been retracting any perpetual rights for reusers, but in my opinion you have because it is not visible from the file page histories, that each image has ever been released under GFDL 1.2 or later. Thus, even if a, say 2005 reuser, would like to get back and check which license the image had at a given point of time, he would be at a loss. In fact, he would be mislead due to the template transclusion. For instance this 2005 revision of a photo as yours renders as if the image page at that time had a GFDL 1.2 only license whereas in fact the user template transcluded at that time had a {{GFDL}} template included. Even if the user manages to figure out that the license history is really embedded in the revision history of User:Fir0002/20D he would not be guided by its history page as the edit summary for the edit, where you change from {{GFDL}} to {{GFDL-1.2}} is blank. Thus, the reuser would have to traverse through the difs of your user template to figure out that the license did change on january 30, 2009. That is truly a mess and I see it as misleading and unreasonably confusing for reusers. The only way to restore order in this is to keep the GFDL license as it was on your images uploaded prior to Jan 30, 2009 (including the opt-out migration option).
  • I agree with you that the discussion in Late May, 2009 in Commons:License Migration Task Force#How do we handle people who want to opt out? was never nullified. But what did we have there in the first place? Well, two users, ChrisiPK and Geni clearly state that they are against having the option to opt out at all in any form. Dragons flight recommends changing from GFDL to GFDL-1.2 as a legally binding way to indicate an opt-out, and Carl Lindberg says that tagging images differently is a good idea, and that one way of doing that is by using GFDL-1.2. I do not see this 2 vs 2 as clear consensus that it is OK to change from GFDL to GFDL-1.2. And I do not agree that it was the responsibility of any of those users to return to this preliminary thread to say actively that it was nullified. Rather it was your responsibility to follow the discussions and decisions after this.
  • On June 13, 2009 in Commons:License Migration Task Force#Template and category scheme, one of the users seeing GFDL-1.2 only as a way to opt-out late May, presented the final license migration solution, which stated that opt-out should be done with a dedicated migration parameter. Clearly, the preliminary opt-out ideas had matured into a technical solution. Nobody has questioned this technical solution. It is the way it should be done.
  • However, for the benefit of your doubt on this, I re-opened the discussion on a page with more traffic (COM:VP) also cross-posting to the the talk pages of relevant commons policy pages that a discussion had re-opened. My objective was to get a clearer indication of the Communitys opinion on this, as I do not want my bot to do edits, which are against the community's will. And what has come out of that discusssion? Infrogmation and you believes that you license change is OK, whereas Rocket000, Tony Wills, Prosfilaes, ChrisiPK, MGA73 and I think it is not OK, because we now have the migration opt-out parameter solution instead. For me that is a pretty clear Community consensus stating that it is not OK.
  • You have this concern that future changes of the GFDL will also not follow your perception of the spirit of the GFDL. That is IMO not a valid reason for cuting off the and later. You had a concern this time, and your concern has resulted in an opt-out program at the discretion of the Community. I am sure that if later version of the GFDL leads to other dramatic license changes which you feel are against the spirit of the GFDL the community will be ready to listen to that and do what is necessary to address your concerns if they are valid concerns.
  • I was teasing you a little bit with what you wrote two years ago;-) Being a physicist, I put a special meaning in words like "never", because never is a mighty long time for a physicist. That results in a lot of eye-rolling from my wife at times ;-) Thus it is a word I personally use with great care ;-) So, I will not hold that against you, that at the the age you had in 2007, two years may have seemed like semi-eternity to you;-) The underlying learning lesson in this is, though, that it is better to just follow the policy that make some promises you have forgotten two years later. As I read the text back then it is certainly not clear for me that you were only alluding to changing a license to a non-commercial, an all rights reserved or something similar. That may be what you had in mind, but it is not clear from the text. Better to avoid such potential misunderstandings altogether.

If this makes sense to you (I hope it does, because as a non-native writer, it takes me a veeery long time to write such a detailed response), I am still very open for and would be delighted to help you in doing the needed template work on your file pages, provided that we keep the GFDL license on files uploaded prior to January 30 including the opt-out parameter.

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