Slashdot Mirror
GFDL 1.3 Is Out, Allows Migration To CC
David Gerard writes "Version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License is out (FAQ). This license is little-used, except on the #8 site in the world: Wikipedia. And this version includes special provisions to re-license wiki-based content from GFDL to the much simpler Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0, as requested by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia plans to hold a public consultation process to decide whether and how to migrate to CC-BY-SA. The discussion is already running hot and heavy."
Am I the only one bewildered by the sheer number of different GNU/FOSS/Whatever-the-right-term-is licences in a field that strives for compatibility and standards?
AT&ROFLMAO
Why bother with this licence at all? Why not just use creative commons? Are there any notable, useful differences or is the licence trying to spread some GNU brand recognition through association?
You are a part of the herd. Go with the flow or be eaten by the big bad wolf. If you want to strike out on your own, remember it's a dog eat dog world out there.
It seems to say that you can now use FDL 1.3 licensed documents under CC-BY-SA 3.0, but only if it was on a wiki before 01 Nov 2008.
Since the license was released on 03 Nov 2008, you would not have been able to put a document on a wiki before then. So is this a reward for people who broke the licensing agreements, an amnesty or what?
The GFDL is based on the narrow politics of the FSF, while CC was created to allow people to choose what restrictions they want on their work.
I'm not sure the wholesale changing of license under author's noses is great, but if they wrote in the GPL suggested "version x or later" clause, well...they agreed to it already. Which is why I don't like giving other people blank contracts. I probably wouldn't have minded if I had donated something as GFDL, but the implications are scary. Said clause gives them permission to do just about anything. Few people I would trust this way.
This is a brilliant move, although i would have preferred it to be for any GDFL content for a limited time rather than just wiki's. Still, it will go along way to presenting a unified front for "free" content distribution and all the advantages that holds
I mean, try and explain to someone that your work is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3! That just souns silly and verbose.
;-)
Much simpler to just say "oh, you know, it's under a plain old Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0".
(I'm kidding, I actually consider this important, it's just that catchy names isn't FOSS' people strongest point
FDL 1.3 also adds proxy support: "now licensors can choose a proxy who is allowed to decide whether or not a work can be licensed under the terms of future versions of the FDL." -- http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html
I haven't looked at this new version of the GFDL yet, but previous versions were simply too complicated for my purposes. I'm not publishing a book, I don't need to worry about front and back covers etc.
I refuse to use CC licences at all either. Which licence? You can use this under the CC licence? Which one? The BY-SA-UK version 1.2 one. The what? Exactly.
Not to mention, in some of the licence terms (depending on which country I think), there are non-free restrictions. For example, not allowed to use the text to libel or some such.
Creative Commons encourages people (both "creators" and users) not to read licences, not to know that their rights are, and generally be ignorant.
What do I do instead? Something simple. Something like:
I get across the point that I want my work to be used, but only on the condition that the copyright line stays, and that downstream viewers of the work have the same right to use and modify the work.
And that is all that is needed for the vast majority of things that I have ever "published" (including photographs).
I wank in the shower.
Basically, Wikipedia was GFDL'd because the GFDL existed at the time. Since then, cc-by-sa has gotten a lot more momentum everywhere else, so it would be nice to move to it so content can be reused between Wikipedia and the many cc-by-sa books, websites, etc. that come out frequently.
The other reason is that the GFDL was designed for software manuals, so some of its technical requirements are highly impractical. You must reprint the entire GFDL text, which is several pages long, with any reuse. Fine if you're reprinting a book of 5,000 Wikipedia articles. But if you just want to print one on a flier, do you have to attach a pamphlet containing the GFDL text to every copy of the flier? And where the hell would you fit the list of all the article's authors, in the "History" section the GFDL requires you to maintain? Cc-by-sa has generally much more reasonable reuse requirements for all of this.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This is basically a special-case clause to let Wikipedia get out of the GFDL and relicense itself to cc-by-sa, because the GFDL turns out to be highly impractical for Wikipedia and especially for any meaningful reuse of its content.
The date clause is designed to prevent someone from using this as a way to relicense all GFDL content that has ever been created, by laundering it through Wikipedia. Since you didn't know about this license until too late, you can't now go take a GFDL software manual, paste it into Wikipedia, and say this allows you to relicense it. Since people who wrote manuals years ago were not expecting to have their work relicensed in this way, the FSF felt compelled to avoid that outcome.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sadly, thanks to corruption, we can no longer rely on the public domain, we must now use lawyers to fight lawyers.
Which is exactly what the lawyers want.
That it's OK to share if you provide attribution and share under the same terms as the liecnse.
Under all Creative Commons licenses, an upstream copyright owner can require you to remove his name from all further copies of the work. For example, see CC-by-sa 3.0 under "remove from the Adaptation any credit". That requirement makes CC licenses incompatible[1] with other licenses that require that copyright notices be preserved. Even not considering compatibility, it can create a logistical nightmare.
Two licenses are "compatible" iff they allow works under those licenses to be combined into a larger work and distributed to the public.
...are the #2 to #7? I know bangbros is the #1 ofc.
Which, if it's anything like any other wikipedia discussion, will result in one cabal fighting another, and end up with an anonymous admin (or Jimbo himself) just deciding whatever they want, regardless of truth or majority viewpoint.
It really is a practicality problem for "meaningful reuse of its content". If you have to staple the entire text of the GFDL to a short article that you hope to print on a flier, you effectively can't reuse that article on a flier. What's more, no reuser can be confident that they're even doing it legally, even if they're willing to take heroic measures. The FSF will not say what the GFDL means as applied to Wikipedia. What is the History section? What is a derived version? What is the Title Page? When it says maintain the history section, does that mean you have to include on every redistributed copy the entire wiki edit history? If so, that surely limits the practicality of reuse.
In any case, I've been one of the people pushing for reuse (though I have no particular position in the WMF, and have not been actively involved), and I'm a strong proponent of the FSF. I like the GPL and LGPL lots, and recommend them as best-choice free-software licenses. But that doesn't mean everything they touch is golden.
As for your allegation that people supporting this change "hate the viral nature" of the GFDL, that wouldn't make any sense--- this relicensing is to another viral license. This isn't a relicensing to just any Creative Commons license you want to pick, but specifically to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (cc-by-sa); the "share-alike" part is a viral copyleft clause.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The hard and heavy discussion contains not even a slipped nipple. Suggest looking elsewhere for erotica.
I record my sleeptalking
Whoever decided on trying to shove a round Wikipedia into a square GFDL initially made a big mistake. I'm suspecting they just didn't even read the GFDL or make any cursory effort to try to map the concepts in the GFDL, which are very obviously designed for software manuals and only for software manuals, onto what they were trying to build. Rather, probably did more of a "hmm, I need a free license for text? I hear that's what the GFDL is, let's use it". Then a few months later people started inventing rationales about which part is the "Title Page" and which is the "History section" once we were already stuck. At least when I started editing around 2003 nobody had any clue what the GFDL meant as applied to Wikipedia, and hadn't even made that much effort yet at clarifying reuse conditions.
It probably would've been a better decision to write a one-paragraph, Wikipedia-specific license on the back of a napkin, doing some sort of generic copyleft with an option of collective attribution to "got this from the Wikipedia article 'articlename'".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Wikipedia is the crown jewel of GFDL. But - GFDL was really originally written to deal with technical documentation to accompany GPL software, not to deal with content on wikis etc. But it seemed like a good license when Wikipedia started so they used it. There is also a lot of Creative Commons content out there that Wikipedia wants to work with, and the GFDL provisions made working everything together difficult.
So what does Stallman do? He magnaminously allows the crown jewel of using GFDL to move towards the CC world, if Wikipedia wants. Can we imagine Microsoft, or SCO or proprietary licensed software companies doing this? No. And it is helping the digital commons community, although from now on Stallman and the FSF will not being getting kudos for the license for Wikipedia content from now on, because Stallman was so gracious about it.
There is a difference between holding to your principles, and being stubborn just for the sake of ego or whatever. Stallman has always held to his principles regarding freedom. But here is an example of him working with others, and being flexible, to help the greater cause of the digital commons. I have to read for years about how inflexible Stallman supposedly is, here is an example to the contrary. Because Stallman is flexible, he is only inflexible about his principles and about freedom.
If I write a GFDL article on my wiki and then I post it on Wikipedia under the GFDL as well, everything is fine: I can share content between the two articles taking care to properly update the history and follow the GFDL, so I continue to benefit from modifications to the Wikipedia copy of my article.
But if suddenly the people who run Wikipedia manage to get FSF do their thing and allow relicensing to CC-BY-SA-3.0 then I am out of luck: Wikipedians will continue making improvements to my article, but they will be now licensed under the CC-BY-SA-3.0 licence, which is incompatible with GFDL. Thus, from the moment Wikipedia switches licences, I will be unable to further benefit from improvements to the Wikipedia copy of my article, and I will not be able to copy the improvements to my copy in my wiki if my wiki is under the GFDL, or if my copy contains substantial contributions by others from my wiki that are under GFDL but were not shared on Wikipedia prior to the relicensing.
A great motivation for using GPL and GFDL is that I am capable of getting back other people's improvements to my code or my articles. If this were not possible, I would use the BSD licence or public domain, or if I were an evil misanthrope I would use standard copyright. But the concept of copyleft as implemented in GFDL and other GNU licences is a great motivation to use these licences so that I can benefit from improvements upon my work by combining these improvements to my copy of the work.
I want to be able to get other people's modifications because I am afraid that if I release my work under the public domain or BSDL then someone who is an evil misanthrope may build upon my work and make improvements to it but not let me have a look to these improvements so that I can combine them with my original work to improve my copy of my work as well (so, imagine writing an article in the public domain, someone translating it to another language but making the translation copyrighted, you won't be able to put the translation on your site, and if you attempt to make a translation yourself you may get sued for copyright infringement for re-translating your own words!).
When I choose an FSF GNU licence for licensing my code or my work, I expect to be able to get other people's modifications under, at the very least, the same licence as I gave my work to the people, because most probably I keep my work under that licence on my wiki/website.
So, now if Wikipedia switches licences, I will lose the ability to transfer content between my GFDL copy and Wikipedia's CC-By-SA-3.0 copy. That would not be an issue if CC-By-SA and GFDL were explicitly compatible. But they are, in fact, excplicitly incompatible (except that GFDL 1.3 no has a short-time window until August 2009 for relicensing to CC-By-SA 3.0 under certain conditions and only for wikis and other MMCSes).
Plus, I see no reason why FSF should accomodate a GFDL user just because they are big. If a person who has written two articles asks FSF to make a future GFDL version permitting relicensing, FSF will probably say no, but now we see a legal person that has actually not written anything but merely hosts content written by others to be able to get FSF do them a favour. This makes me unwilling to allow "or any later versions" when I license under the GPL or GFDL, because I don't know who is going to influence FSF in the future.
However, seeing the matter on a more pragmatic level, I have to agree that the GFDL is a very difficult licence for a wiki, and CC-By-SA 3.0 is much easier to use. Plus, if the relicensing goes forward, I will be partly very happy because I will be able to share Wikipedia articles without including a huge GFDL document plus an extremely huge history everywhere, and there will not be the question of who the most important five authors are, anymore. But if Wikipedia switches licences, I will also be sad because this will make it difficult to keep a local GFDL copy of my work and a Wikipedia CC-By-SA-3.0 copy synchronised. In fact, i
When you think about it, GFDL means authors can't get improvements back, too...
As the author, you can release your work under multiple licenses. For example, you can release one version under GFDL, another under CC-BY-SA, and a third under a non-transferrable license similar to the way TrollTech dual-licenses Qt.
Any improvements anyone does to any of these versions of the work can't be reincorporated back into your own work, and you are restricted in how you can re-use it. That's a straightforward and unavoidable result of the way mandatory-permission licenses work. If you don't like that, use a discretionary-permission license like the BSDL or MIT license.
GFDL 1.3 says that this relicensing is ok only under certain conditions. One condition is that the site holding the previously GFDL-licensed content must have been a massive collaboration site (MMCS or how they call it), and they specifically say that this includes public wikis. But there is a big problem here: they say that this site is defined as being on a WWW server.
I see no reason why a wiki or any other massive collaboration site should be on a WWW server. And exactly what is WWW? Is it TCP port 80? What if my WWW server is on 8080? Is WWW any server adhering to HTTP? What if I have made private patches to my WWW server so that it uses something which is based on HTTP but different from it and I use it to massively collaborate with other people running the same patches? Couldn't I implement a massive collaboration site using FTP, or some BBS software?
I see no reason why we must be so WWW-centric when talking about the Internet. The Internet is more than the WWW. The Internet is not even specifically TCP/IP: I could wrap another protocol in TCP/IP, or I could make a proxy to another network which is not TCP/IP at all, or I could make patches to my TCP/IP stack so that it becomes very different from TCP/IP and persuade other people use my patches as well.
And when we talk about WWW, do we talk about WWW servers accessible via ICANN's DNS network, via OpenNIC's DNS root, or via IP address? And should a site use HTML or XHTML in order to be considered WWW? Couldn't I serve non-HTML content over HTTP on port 80? Couldn't I implement a public wiki using good old SGML or maybe my own XML variant over HTTP to be used with a custom browser? (in fact now Wikipedia has enabled MediaWiki's write API, I think, so you can play with it using your own tools I think)
WWW-centriness is a bad idea in general. Never assume that if something is on the Internet, then it is on the WWW. Someone could devise a wiki running over email, over BitTorrent, over svn, over anything, maybe even over Gopher or a distributed filesystem (in fact there is wikipediafs in which you can mount Wikipedia or other MediaWiki sites in your filesystem, but I think it's unmaintainable now however).
Of course I know the discussion is more theoretical than practical, because in practice most if not all wikis are on the WWW and it was just Wikipedia and maybe a few other wikis that wanted to switch, and the relicensing provision was made just for them not for any GFDL content. But I still don't like seeing WWW-centriness. In the early days WWW was just a toy and most Internet work was done with other services, not WWW, and there is absolutely no reason to regard WWW as more important than other services.
There is a whole lot of mis-information about what is happening and why it is happening. I also don't believe Jimbo Wales when he said that he would have selected another license had it been available at the time.
One of the things not spoken here is how the GNUpedia project was merged into Nupedia (and Wikipedia at the same time), which also included some who were already committed to the GFDL at the very beginning for exactly what the GFDL represented. This was not a small group of people who gave Wikipedia an early boost at a critical time in the history of that project. I know this, as I was one of those people who transitioned from GNUpedia to Wikipedia.
There are some individuals on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation who are also involved with Creative Commons, and I believe there is a little bit of a conflict of interest here. Of course conflicts of interest are hardly new to Wikimedia politics either.
Creative Commons has some good licenses, and they certainly have a role to play in the development of free content. But they aren't the ultimate solution, nor do I think it is necessarily the best thing for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects to transition into the CC-by-SA (or whatever license, I'm really not sure the exact license that is being selected).
This transition is being spearheaded by some diehard Creative Commons fans that have a near religious attitude about this transition which is also "forget what anybody else thinks here, we must make this change and make the change now!"
I personally would have preferred to have the GFDL modified to take care of some of the very legitimate concerns about shorter excerpts that required republishing the whole GFDL license along with the content, and some of the other problem issues that still haven't been resolved with this "transition" to a newer version of the GFDL.
This is also a dangerous move for the Free Software Foundation, as it sort of breaks the contract with the content developers on the belief that the FSF wouldn't ever "sell out" to some high power interests. While this is an extreme, it is almost like the next rev of the GPL allowing you to re-license all content under the Microsoft EULA. Yeah, the Creative Commons license still is mostly a "free content" license at least, but then again it isn't fool-proof either, nor do I trust Creative Commons due to their strong-arm tactics that have been involved here with modifying the GFDL.
They certainly don't represent all stake holders in the GFDL'd content.... even on just Wikipedia.
"If I write a GFDL article on my wiki and then I post it on Wikipedia under the GFDL as well, everything is fine: I can share content between the two articles taking care to properly update the history and follow the GFDL, so I continue to benefit from modifications to the Wikipedia copy of my article."
Are you quite sure of that? So sure you'd bet a lawsuit on it?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
"If I write a GFDL article on my wiki and then I post it on Wikipedia under the GFDL as well, everything is fine: I can share content between the two articles taking care to properly update the history and follow the GFDL, so I continue to benefit from modifications to the Wikipedia copy of my article." Are you quite sure of that? So sure you'd bet a lawsuit on it?
I think that a cautious person should be sure about nothing, of course. Assuming that you mean that GFDL may be untested or too complex/unclear in some respects, and talking hypothetically about the worst that could ever happen, I see absolutely no reason that anyone should feel safe even if using a well-tested and clear-cut licence.
A licence is a piece of paper, and its contents can become life-threatening only when presented in front of an impartial judge. But how could one assume that a case is every going to be presented in front of a judge at all, or that the judge will be impartial? (in some countries impartial judges are a rare luxury).
Chances are that if someone is very angry with someone for any reason, or even no reason, they will probably find a way to do what they want, especially in countries where there is no well-developed legal system and rampant corruption: in some countries judges are too happy to accept bribes or influence by politically well-connected litigants, or perhaps in some countries some people may be used to seeking remedies with violent means outside the courts (I don't speak about any specific country). Even in countries will well-developed justice systems, one can never know what may happen, so just considering that all potential threats will come through the legal system is an incorrect assumption.
So, if you ask me, I personally believe that it is far more important not to give anyone's any reason for becoming angry in the first place, because one can never know how determined or how crazy an opponent can be and what means they have at their disposal. I think one should always consider that the worst is possible.
The best strategy is to act in a way that is not likely to cause any rational potential opponent to require a legal opinion on a licence. This means that one should act within socially acceptable cultural norms that are likely to be acceptable by rational people. Generally, people posting GFDL material probably mostly care about making their work available to the world and not letting people to claim exclusivity on their work, plus about getting proper credit. If these conditions are met, rational people will probably not get angry. With these conditions met, it remains to deal with the irrational potential opponents, who cannot be managed in any way other than increasing one's security anyway (including having a good lawyer ready for various potential threats, plus a good shielded door).
So, in short, my philosophy is: never assume a document is going to save a case, don't make other people feel angry in the first place, and keep any security systems well-working and ready for defence. But the most important than all is not to let other people feel willing to do something bad, as much as possible.
Of course, more important than that is not to get more paranoid than needed :) The probability of a real threat deriving from misunderstandings over a licence designed to give a gift of knowledge to humanity is maybe very low. This doesn't mean that it can't happen to find a crazy person willing to launch a lawsuit or other nasty things over technicalities. It just has a very low probability of happening (of course the probability is culture-dependent, and some in some countries people are more likely to go to courts than in other countries, so for these countries one should place some more attention to licences).
Whoever decided on trying to shove a round Wikipedia into a square GFDL initially made a big mistake. I'm suspecting they just didn't even read the GFDL or make any cursory effort to try to map the concepts in the GFDL, which are very obviously designed for software manuals and only for software manuals [my emphasis], onto what they were trying to build.
It's arguably worse than that; I assume that you had the main part of Wikipedia (i.e. the text) in mind, but of course, WP also consists of images and it permits- if not encourages- licensing of them under the GFDL. Problem is that some important parts of it just don't seem to make sense *at all* when applied to images!
A lot of people probably just think of the general gist of the GFDL and think "oh, GFDL, that's good", then license their work under it. I've done that myself.
However, I've since re-read it and tried (and failed) to understand what *exactly* it said when applied to images as opposed to text. The conclusion I came to wasn't merely that it was wasn't originally designed with that use in mind and hence slightly convoluted- that much is obvious- it's that much of it just does not- and hence can not- be applied to images.
It's a while since I read it, but from what I remember- at best, a literal interpretation of the GFDL would make image reuse under it impractical, and at worst (and more likely) it has so many key parts that don't really make sense when applied to images that it (a) provides no guidance to people using it about what they can and can't do and (b) if it was ever used legally in court, it would require undue amounts of interpretation, judgement and legalistic judgement to even make it "fit" this context and hence- just guessing since IANAL- (c) any of its use for images may be thrown out of court for that precise reason.
In short, IMHO the GFDL is at best vague and inappropriate and at worst meaningless when applied to images. The CC licenses OTOH, seem to be much more appropriate.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
According to the FAQ anyway (I haven't parsed the license text fully), the Nov 1 cutoff is only for externally originating GFDL content that was imported into Wikipedia, like the FOLDOC entries that Wikipedia imported years ago. Any material after that date that *originates* on Wikipedia can still be relicensed.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It was unfortunate the GFDL licence was created, because the GPL was good enough for most textual works and certainly good enough for Wikipedia. (And plain MIT/X was also available.) It is unfortunate the FSF created a GPL-incompatible license with the GFDL. It's also unfortunate they do not fix this incompatability ASAP, since the line between code and content can get blurry fairly quickly sometimes. Some of these issues are at:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License
And then there are now endless versions of Creative Commons licenses to muddy the waters with incompatible versions.
And then there is the ambiguity of "no commercial use" licenses.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It may take a long explanation, but the short is: Stallman not only demands everyone cave to his specific definition of "free", but he also wants control over everything.
The FSF often requires you to sign over copyright for them to give legal protection for a project--why? Some argue they need to so they can more easily use their lawyers, but they could just as easily set up a fund for lawyers or some other solution. They should at least give some help. How do we know these copyrighted works will be safe. How do we know the FSF will always be in "good" hands? In fact, why will they only help those who release under a GNU license? If they really want to support the creation of "Free Software", why does it only have to be under only Stallman's terms. The only answer I can think of would be Sallman wants to own all "Free Software."
He is also very hostile towards anyone who does not completely give in to him or "steals" his spotlight. (such as Linux) He seems more interested in politics and himself than the good of programming freedom in general or the enhancement of technology.
These are my concerns. Actually I do like some of his general ideas of sharing code, but I also think programmers should have a choice to keep their code copyrighted, as I also believe they should be allowed to free it. Both can coexist. Software patents I question, because they create monopolies, but that is another issue.