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

Bewildered

[Linker3000]

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?

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:Bewildered

[_merlin]

It's also a community based on the premise that you have a right to "fork" things. Given that, it's hardly surprising that people invent their own licenses.

Re:Bewildered

[jonaskoelker]

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.

I'm confused

[Chrisq]

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?

Why not?

[sowth]

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.

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.

Re:It even _sounds_ simpler too!

[Jugalator]

Actually, I like the CC name as it quite clearly describes what it's providing. That it's OK to share if you provide attribution and share under the same terms as the liecnse.

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.

Re:that's part of the point of this relicensing

[David Gerard]

The other issue is that no-one understands the GFDL. Not even the FSF. Really - you email licensing@fsf.org with a GFDL query, you will get back a response, three months later, saying "read the license text and consult with your attorney." Our attorney is Mike Godwin and it makes even his head hurt.

The FSF have given up making any sense of the license, so we can hardly be expected to.

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.

"Stallman is hard to deal with"

[br00tus]

For years we here how hard Stallman is to deal with, supposedly. How it is all about him and he is egotistical etc.

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.