Hello.. Been researching into the legalities of compiling lots of related Wikipedia content into an sellable ebook. As far as I can tell this is legally OK to do as long as all the content is either licensed under the 'GNU Free Documentation License' or is in the public domain. Anyone know about the legalities of this that could explain it in plain english? I've read the 'GFDL' article from Wikipedia but I'm not sure I completely understand it. Thanks...
Absolutely you can recompile the content and sell it. Exceeeeept.....you've got to license your stuff under the GPL (or variant) as well since that's how it was handed to you. Which means if I buy a copy from you, I can turn around and distribute it identically for free. So your first customer is an instant competitor. You can't prevent this if you are using GPL'ed content - the GPL is designed to ensure that this is the case. There are ways to make money from GPL'ed stuff, but I'm not so sure what you're suggesting is the way to do it. If you've got some fancy new way of packaging GPL'ed content, I'd probably suggest considering some type of ads instead. That's what directories do that use GPL'ed programs, all those linux man pages sites do, and so on.