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

[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.

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.