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GFDL 1.3 Is Out, Allows Migration To CC

Posted by kdawson on from the creative-commons-compatible dept.

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."

2 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Bewildered by Linker3000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Bewildered by jonaskoelker · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Before GFDL arrived nearly every software product had a different licence.

      Wouldn't that be the GPL you're talking about? The GNU FDL is the license meant for doc, not src.

      The general public license is a license that takes the ideas of the Bison public license, the Emacs public license plus some others, and puts those ideas into one license. The FSF then changed the licensing of Bison/Emacs/???/Profit to use the GPL rather than the [BE?P]PL.

      And the GPL is a good thing. The problem is that we've been going back to the old days. Instead of emacs and bison, we have the Linux public license, the ZFS public license, the Apache public license, the Perl public license, the Python public license and the Firefox public license.

      [Some of names have been changed to indict the guilty ;)]

      Even if only counting the FSF licenses, we have a large amount. It means the compatibility matrix is huge, and entries can only be accessed in polynomial time by lawyers.