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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.
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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?