Citizendium: Compatibility with Wikipedia license and a non-commercial license
The Citizendium has not yet a license, but there are debates on which they should choose. The two main points are whether it would allow commercial redistribution and whether it would be compatible with Wikipedia’s GFDL.
The main argument for a non-commercial license is that more academics would allow their content to be redistributed just for non-commercial use. However, there is a contradiction, which perhaphs was not yet noticed by anyone: contributors to Citizendium don’t simply license their content, but actually give all the rights on redistribution to the Citizendium Foundation, thus giving them a blank cheque, allowing them to use the content in commercial ways as they see it fit.
As such, while anyone can legally use the Wikipedia content in a commercial way, the content from Citizendium can be commercially exploited just by the Citizendium Foundation, which can legally sell the content to commercial publishers. It’s not clear whether this loophole was thought by Sanger, but it’s clear that it makes Citizendium less attractive to potential contributors, not more as intended.
The CZ community appears to be against Wikipedia being able to take and modify articles from Citizendium and a license non-compatible with wikipedia (Creative Commons) is likely to be used.
The main problem is that Citizendium uses some articles from Wikipedia, which would requires them to use GFDL. Larry Sanger thought that it might be possible to use GFDL just for such articles, but this could lead to an unfair situation: Citizendium can use any original Wikipedia article, but Wikipedia can’t use original Citizendium articles.
However, the issue on whether forks from Wikipedia articles are to be allowed is not yet clear, as there are many unsettled issues on licensing and policy on Citizendium. It’s too early to tell and perhaphs all this discussion is nothing more than a simple speculation.