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Wikipedia to be Licensed Under Creative Commons
sla291 writes "Jimmy Wales made an announcement yesterday night at a Wikipedia party in San Francisco : Creative Commons, Wikimedia and the FSF just agreed to make the current Wikipedia license compatible with Creative Commons (CC BY-SA). As Jimbo puts it, 'This is the party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia'."
If you RTFM, it's not that they're moving Wikipedia from GFDL to CC-BY-SA; rather, the GFDL is becoming compatible with CC-BY-SA. If the GFDL license in use had the usual "or any future version" clause in use, then the content was initially given with permission for relicensing under this new version -- so no problem at all.
I heard RMS give a talk where he criticized Creative Commons (the organization) because not all of the licenses they publish guarantee freedom. As he put it (paraphrasing from memory): "If you take the intersection of all the licenses offered by Creative Commons, you get nothing. There are no core freedoms that all the licenses guarantee."
Basically, RMS thinks that some of the licenses are great (the ones that allow redistribution, derivative works, and promote share-alike), but thinks others are terrible. RMS is famous for being careful with words, and dislikes the fact that when you say "this is available under a Creative Commons license" it basically means nothing (until you know which specific license is being used, you don't know what freedoms are being guaranteed).
Of course the FSF's intention is to promote freedom, whereas the Creative Commons organization has as its core mandate something more along the lines of "promote understanding of copyright law, and show copyright holders that they don't have to use a maximal, all-rights-reserved copyright, but that they can distribute under more permissive licenses, too." The creative commons organization emphasizes author choice instead of user freedom.
Still, all that having been said, there is some clear overlap between the CC licenses and the GPL. So, an appropriate license can certainly be compatible, and I'm fairly confident that RMS approves of those freedom-granting licenses.
The whole notion of "or any future version" of the license, as is commonly used in GPL and GFDL licenses, has always worried me. IANAL, but from a legal standpoint, it seems odd that you can agree in a binding way to something which is yet to be defined.
Plus there's the (seemingly vanishingly small, at present) risk of the FSF being co-opted by some faction which changes the licenses in ways which make them entirely different in spirit to the current versions. That wouldn't mean the content wouldn't still be available under the current versions of the licenses (you can't un-license it once it's out there), but it could mean that forks could be made which were non-free. How do we know that, in say 40 years, the leadership of the FSF will be as principled and uncorruptible as the current leadership?
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
the op is no longer correct. the article has been updated to say that wikipedia will be cc-compatible, not that it will switch to it. to quote:
this is a bit of legal-hair-splitting (standard ianal disclaimer), but it does mean that there there shouldn't be any legal issues with converting prior content.
also it seems that the cc by-sa license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ is basically equivalent to the gfdl. it is not "public-domain"ing the content, nor is it "bsd"ing the content. it just seems to make it a less-software-centric license. (anyone else, please feel free to correct.)
Principally that the GFDL has some clauses that make odd but relatively minor requirements. It bars the makers of derivative works from removing any "invariant sections" from the original work (does not apply to Wikipedia). Distributing any GFDL work requires that you distribute with it a "transparent" copy of the entire license, which is impractical for a single printed Wikipedia article, for instance. But the core rights that the GFDL grants (duplication, derivative works, commerical or non-commercial use) are the same as those granted by CC-BY-SA. The GFDL just contains some "FSF-isms".
Appropriately enough, the Wikipedia article on the GFDL includes a list of criticisms that cover this topic.
Never mistake "can" for "should".
GFDL requires that so-called "Invariant Sections" (talking about the author and their relationship to the subject matter) be carried forward into future versions unchanged. Wikipedia articles don't have Invariant Sections, but you could take a Wikipedia article, change it, and then add an invariant section; everybody who wanted to use your changes would then have to keep the invariant section intact.
GFDL also requires that the title of the work be changed after every modification, and that sections titled "Acknowledgment" and "Dedication" be kept intact. Nobody really cares about these clauses, and Wikipedia has long ignored them.
If you want to redistribute a (modified) version of a work, the GFDL also requires that you accompany it with a copy of the GFDL and list at least five of the principal authors of the work on its title page. That's also widely ignored, by Wikipedia and others.
A work licensed under CC-BY-SA can be relicensed under any later version of CC-BY-SA and also under any license deemed equivalent by Creative Commons (since CC-BY-SA 3.0). A work licensed under GFDL can only be relicensed under a later version if the licensor explicitly added a clause to that effect; the Wikipedia license agreement contains such a clause, but a downstream distributor could remove it.