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."

Comments

Re:Bewildered

[tmk]

Actually these licenses are an huge improvement. BEfore GFDL arrived nearly every software product had a different licence. And not two were compatible.

Re:Important question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia was started before Creative Commons existed. The only good free text licence at the time was the GFDL. All content on Wikipedia is thus currently GFDL licensed.

The 1.3 update to the GFDL allows for Wikipedia to switch to Creative Commons if it so wishes.

So, GNU is the good guys here.

that's part of the point of this relicensing

[Trepidity]

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.

on purpose to protect existing GFDL authors

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:on purpose to protect existing GFDL authors

[geniice]

While it is technically true that most of the problems of the GFDL could be fixed by improving the GFDL and creating the GSFDL the FSF has shown little inclination to do this. Remember 1)GFDL is not a free license (it contains rather a lot of invariant sections as well as deliberate ones) 2)It is unusable for images in many contexts. Postcards say. 3)even for text it is highly problematical using GFDL text with a computer program is not easy. This is not a case of CC supporters trying to knock the FSF. In fact a number of the supporters of this move either dislike or do not entirely trust CC. The problem is the FSF has proven either unable or unwilling to produce a viable free content license with the result that a switch to CC-BY-SA has become the only reasonable choice.

that's not why this change is being made

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:an original error

[David Gerard]

I understand RMS threatened to do a GNUpedia unless Nupedia adopted the GFDL. [citation needed, I don't have it to hand]