Alex Hudson home@alexhudson.com writes:
Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
Yes, but isn't this inevitable no matter how the change of licence is done?
No, [...]
In previous drafts I saw, there was an idea of being able to relicense to a "GNU Wiki License" which would have presumably been CC-BY-SA compatible without needing to relicense to that license[...]
If that option had been open-ended[...]
It's possible that after trying, they decided that licence compatibility was impossible.
I'm also not sure if licence compatibility can be open-ended. If the hypothetical GNU Wiki License was compatible with cc-by-sa-3.0, then the window of compatibility would close when cc-by-sa was changed in an incompatible way. So there's an end either way, and dates are probably a cleaner end because they're fixed and they don't create the inconvenience that decisions to update cc-by-sa in good-but-incompatible ways now also invoke this end of compatibility.