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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'."
Can you include a GPL code snippet in a Creative Commons document (e.g., to illustrate a concept)?
It's not a simple question. For instance, it is ironic to note that you cannot legally include GPL code in a document licensed under the GNU Free[sic] Documentation License.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
GPL may not restrict commercial use and sale of software, but it sure makes it difficult. Like it or not, a large amount of software written today is written for financial gain. GPL makes it quite literally impossible to ensure you get paid for your work, because anyone who buys your software also gets the code and full right to give it out to whoever they want to.
It's good that some companies can make money on services and support (Red Hat etc), but that doesn't work everywhere.
There needs to be an open source license that gives you everything the GPL does, but only to people who paid for the software. Anyone who has a license for the software can modify it all they want, give out their modifications and even complete modified versions, but only to others who have a license for the software.
Years of observation has shown (time and again) that all those wacky things RMS warns about generally come true a year or two later.
It's funny you say that. I would have said exactly the opposite. My years of observation have shown (time and again) that the software world carries on developing new things for commercial, charitable and personal use purposes, without any great disaster happening because it isn't all licensed under something like the GPL.
Meanwhile, all the claimed benefits of the GPL have turned out to be rather shallow in practice. Forking of major projects happens relatively rarely. Most end users of most software don't really want to be able to hack the code (not least because most of them wouldn't even know where to start). Those who are willing to share their work with the community get tied up in silly arguments over the technicalities of the licences in question, and that problem has been made worse by the introduction of the GPL2 vs. GPL3 debate. The entire OSS world has not collapsed under the weight of patent claims, nor is it ever likely to with or without GPL3's help for the simple reason that many major businesses now rely on it and they have patents of their own to fight back with, just as everyone in the commercial world has done for years.
On the whole, with due respect to his past achievements, I'd say these days RMS talks a lot but often comes across badly and isn't particularly relevant in the modern software development world. I'd back the pragmatist every time.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Hmmm... This is a good thought here.
The closest that I've seen to something like this is what the old Borland did with the original Delphi source code. It still belonged to Borland, but they gave you the complete source code for nearly the entire compiler, and in theory you were permitted to share changes to that source code with anybody else who bought a licensed copy of that compiler. It in fact was a fairly common practice among Delphi programmers.
They also did something that was fairly unusual for compiler writers (although fairly common now): They explicitly granted license for the libraries for you to use in any way you wanted... as long as you gave them only others who paid for the license. And the binaries were completely free of copyright restrictions for the end-user (meaning the software developer/publisher). You don't worry about this with GCC, but other major compilers did have some pretty profound restrictions on how you were "allowed" to redistribute your software once it ran through their compiler... or be required to pay some sort of licensing fee for the library files needed to run your software.
An "open source" license like you are talking about still doesn't deal with what happens to abandonware, which IMHO is one of the real strengths of the GPL: If MySQL A.B. goes completely out of business, the MySQL software will still be available from many sources, and you will even be able to find people willing to make patches for the software and make future updates and releases. There is no GPL'd abandonware, other than the thought that a particular development group has disbanded (like the ReiserFS group run by Han Reiser).
Requiring somebody to purchase a license from a single entity of some sort gives a worry that the people collecting the money from the licenses may not be available if you don't have the license and really need the software. Under this sort of arrangement, how would you solve this problem without resorting to something like the GPL?