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'."

Comments

"Free as in whatever RMS feels like"

[moosesocks]

RMS has always worried me. He's a bit too much of an idealist, and things like the "future license" clause make the GPL extremely vulnerable in the future.

I don't know if I'd call the FSF's current leadership "principled and uncorruptible" as much as I'd call it stubborn and headstrong, with RMS being one of the most unjustifiably arrogant public figures of the moment. Don't get me wrong, the FSF has done some absolutely fantastic work, to which much credit is owed to RMS. However, something about their ideology just never sat right with me.

Since the inevitable "RMS is a communist" comparison will come up, I should point out that Lenin was a pretty reasonable guy, who gave himself far too much power, which let his successors (ie. Stalin) piss all over what he built.

Free software, and freedom of information are both fantastically good things. However, the FSF's approach to it feels somewhat impractical, and likely to blow up in the future. Perhaps you could make the analogy GFDL is to Creative Commons as Communism is to Socialism. One is a great idea in theory but is completely impractical in reality, whereas the other one makes a few small concessions in order to make it practical.