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Wikipedia Community Vote On License Migration
mlinksva writes "A Wikipedia community vote is now underway on migrating to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as the main content license for Wikimedia Foundation projects. This would remove a legal barrier to reusing Wikipedia content (now under the Free Documentation License, intended for narrow use with software documentation, because Wikipedia started before CC existed) in other free culture projects and vice versa."
What about existing content? I don't recall being asked to allow my edits to be re-licensed later. Won't they face the same problem Linux would if it went to GPLv3?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Existing content contributed to Wikipedia was done under the GFDL license, which like the standard GPLv2 includes a "or later version" clause. Wikipedia's license includes this clause.
The latest version of the GFDL now contains a section I think written to specifically allow Wikimedia to do this. See section 11, "Relicensing" here:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
"I want to get more into theory, because everything works in theory." -John Cash
The CCSA is backwards compatible with the GFDL.
If you have a WP account with at least 25 edits before March 15, please vote yes on this. The only reason WP picked GFDL was that CC-BY-SA didn't exist when WP began. GFDL and CC-BY-SA are the same style of license; they're both GPL-ish as opposed to BSD-ish, because they both require derived works to be under the same license. GFDL sucks for a variety of reasons:
CC-BY-SA is far more widely used at this point. Switching to CC-BY-SA eliminates legal hassles that would otherwise be involved in making derived workds using WP. As a concrete example, I wrote some CC-BY-SA-licensed books, and when I want to use a photo or something from WP, the GFDL licensing creates hassles. I ended up having to dual-license the books, and that shouldn't be necessary. If people want to use the commons (both putting in and taking out), there shouldn't be artificial barriers to doing so.
Plenty of people have already posted about the legal aspects of why relicensing is possible, but the long and the short of it is that relicensing complies with both the letter and the spirit of the law. It complies with the letter of the law because of the later version clause. It complies with it in spirit because GFDL and CC-BY-SA are similar types of licenses, just implemented badly in one case and well in the other.
Find free books.
It is too bad Metascore is still under development. A sophisticated system like that would be so superior to a simple vote.
Note: they need developers, if anyone is willing/able to help.
I'll be the first to admit that this seems pretty tricky at first - that the GNU and Wikipedia could get together and retroactively re-license an entire project through the "later versions" clause. However, the later versions have to be "similar in spirit" to the original in order for this to happen. If they did this to re-license Wikipedia's GFDL content under the BSD license or the public domain, that would not be similar in spirit. The differences between the CCSA and the GFDL are minor, especially in the context of Wikipedia - which uses no front cover texts or invariant sections. The big one is the need to attach a copy of the license to the content (as opposed to a URI to the license) - it is a bit absurd that I've violated the GFDL by printing out a copy of a Wikipedia article and giving it to my students, because I didn't think to attach a copy of the GFDL to it.
Good move. It is wrong to re-license public domain or complete free materials with a more restricted license.
There are many more such cases, please correct them all.
It's a good thing they outsourced the voting. If they tried to handle it through the wiki, you'd have a good chance of the whole site being renamed Colbertpedia.
I know that the wikipediots have decided that they can rewrite the law with their little straw polls...
They're not conducting "straw polls", they are reaching a verifiable consensus.{{fact}}
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
All OSS licenses are windbaggy ideological bullshit
Bigot. All licenses are windbaggy ideological bullshit.
How do you define "radically change"? What's going to change that would hurt you as a past contributer? Do you even know? Have you even thought about it? Of course not, you're just here for your daily dosage of self-righteous indignation. Go ejaculate your sarcastic rants elsewhere. The only people that care about this are the ones that have no reason to. Go figure.
Please don't do that. That undermines the attempt to derive an honest consensus. Also, when things have been voted on in the past they have then gone through and looked at the IP and useragent data and struck through any obvious sockpuppets. All you are doing is making more effort for everyone involved. Vote with a single account.
Whatever happened to "Wikipedia is not... a democracy"?
A-Fucking-Men.
Prohibited on many college campuses now due to inaccuracies, misinterpretations of the original cites and bias.
When it comes to matters of editing, it's not.
When it comes to matters of licensing, it is more so.
The vote doesn't actually determine the outcome. The board will analyze the votes and the results and decide the outcome.
The board could strike down the proposal even if it gets 90% support.
Interesting for other reasons: "Wikimedia Foundation joins protest against Obama's RIAA appointments"
What is the point of ShareAlike if anyone can edit Wikipedia?
I've been in this business a long time. There are dozens. Heck, maybe hundreds of "Open Source Licenses", and I really can't tell the difference between them. There's Apache, GPL, Eclipse, CPL, QPL, and even BSD which get some people into raging fits.
Okay BSD is a bit different because you can -- in theory -- produce your own changes and keep those as proprietary. Apple did this with Mac OS X. However, they could have done pretty much the same thing with Linux too. Watch:
1). Company "X" submits to the Linux project some code changes that will allow Company "X" to hook its proprietary code into the Linux kernel. Completely legal according to the Linux GPL license.
2). These hooks would probably be rejected by the Linux project, but Company "X" could still use them although they'd be under the GPL license.
3). Company "X" now creates a proprietary layer on top of Linux using their GPL hooks to link it to the Kernel. The proprietary layer would sit above the GPL'd code and officially be separate from it.
The end result: Linux kernel under GPL, Company "X"'s special code that hooks into the proprietary layers under GPL, but not supported by the Linux project. Company "X"'s proprietary code on top not under GPL. A full OS. Yes, it's a bit more work than simply taking the basic BSD code, adding in proprietary changes directly into the kernel, but in the end, it's pretty much the same to the end user.
I use a lot of OSS software, and I support many OSS projects. But all this care and concern about licensing is unbelievable. Linux is Linux not because of the license, but because Linus Torvalds is a top rate project manager who knew what was important and what wasn't important.
Torvalds didn't jump on the microkernel bandwagon because he thought it the cool design wasn't worth the performance hit. Linus created his code to be X86 specific because it was faster that way.
Linus has carefully avoided all these piddling political wars about nonsense and has carefully focused his entire project and has kept his project from splitting apart in fratricidal wars that had engulfed the BSD world.
Yet, we get into these silly arguments. Was it worth the time and effort to create the GNOME project just because KDE depended upon a small set of propriety (even though freely licensed) QT Libraries? (BTW, I tend to use the GNOME desktop myself). What would the Linux desktop look like if the desktop environment wasn't split into two major camps and all that effort could have been put into building a full feature, yet friendly desktop?
In the end, it's all OSS and it's all good.
Relicensing collaborative work is not something that can be done by ballot unless the outcome is 100% one way or the other.
But didn't you read? It's not re-licensing. Nope, nope, it's not.
The following is how they did it:
1. Write a new version of the current licence.
2. *handwavey-magic*
3. The work is now under a different licence!
See? No re-licensing at all. Nope, not at all!
I think the only appropriate response to that post is tl;dr
Because so many here are clueless about copyright licensing, I thought I'd give a brief explanation of what it entails.
See many people think that you can't relicense a work without explicit agreement of anybody and everybody who ever edited that work. Picture go through the mind like vast emails asking a submitter about the semicolon at the end of line 35,219 in one of over a million files.
But if that were the case, a work could basically NEVER be relicensed! You're never going to get explicit permission from everybody (or even a majority) who has submitted to wikipedia.
Instead, there's a legal process wherein the license change is proposed in a very public forum, clearly documented as such, for a 'reasonable' period of time which depends on the work in question, the number of people involved, and the reqirements of the legal jurisdiction(s) in question.
During this time, having been given legally recognized reasonable notice, copyright holdeers can either agree to the change (by doing nothing) or they can object to the claim and withdraw copyrights to their works. This process (or very similar) exists around the world and applies when there are many people holding copyrights to a shared work. In practice, it works something like the legal notice section in your local newspaper, only in this case, it's global. (you do know about the legal notice section in your local paper, right?)
IANAL and all that, but I have done a fair share of legal stuffi n pro per, etc....
But it may be more simple than that: when you submitted your work(s) to wikipedia, dd you READ the license you were submitting it under? In many cases (not necessarily Wikipedia) you are granting the copyrights themselves to the receiver. AFAIK, WP doesn't work this way or they wouldn't have become so popular.
So the question comes back to you: Do you disagree with the license change? And if not, which of your submissions do you object to them using under the new license?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I voted for the change yesterday, but after doing so, I began to think about what this will actually solve.
I mean, their problem is the GFDL in its current implementation being slightly too difficult to work with, and generally not really what they want for Wikipedia. Correct?
My question is, since they plan to DUAL LICENSE everything, not only replace the GFDL with CC-BY-SA (apparently), won't they still be bound to whatever problems they have with their old license? So how will this fix their problem?
A license change seemed inevitable to me, I read through the original GDFL and it didn't seem to be a very good fit for WiKipedia or it's sister projects. I was guessing there would be either through an addendum to the GDFL itself, or through a move to an entirely new license, now it seems we're getting both.
Several comments above are calling this a hack, but the way Wikipedia was placed under the GDFL seemed to be a hack to begin with. With the GDFL "...in any medium, that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this License", which (if I'm understanding correctly) states that for a work to be redistributed, the original authors need to have their name included along with a copy of the GDFL stating their agreement with it. Many authors weren't doing this as it was and article History tabs weren't really doing this properly either.
I have worked on several other WiKi based sites under different licenses in the past and one of the most rewarding parts was seeing an article I contributed to being translated into several different languages. I was disappointed when I created an account on Wikipedia to find out that this, although technically possible, wasn't always feasible under the GDFL, as with the license you had to go back through and obtain permission from all the original authors before it could be translated. To a degree, the GDFL was making the official WikiMedia projects incompatible with each other, let alone other sites under different licenses.
I had several documentation and book projects I had created in the past that I was looking to place on the official WikiMedia sites, but the attribution extremities of the GDFL kept me from moving them there. I can see the original GDFL working for small documentation projects, were you can get all the authors together to all agree on the license and establish an appropriate authors page, but for larger things such as Wikibooks and Wikipedia it created a lot of hassles.
This is rubbish. If you can't get explicit agreement from a contributor you need to trace them down or replace their contribution, unless you have explicitly obtained the contribution under a licensing agreement.
In this case, Wikimedia's licensing agreement under which contributions were made explicitly allows changing the license to a later version of GFDL, and the latest version of that allows relicensing under CC-BY-SA 3.0 - see many other posts here for the full explanation.
So the voting is about whether Wikimedia's community agree with the policy, not about whether you agree with your submissions being relicensed - you already gave them that right (without assigning copyright to them)
You're right. At least under Dutch law, the clause would be illegal. For it to be legal, Wikipedia should either have explicitly asked their contributors to give up any copyright claims to their contributions, which they did not do (in fact Wikipedia explicitly stated that contributors kept their copyright, allowing relicensing of their own contributions if they wanted), or it should have included some kind of termination clause, granting contributors the right to opt out of the license switch. American law may work differently though.
That being said, contributors were never asked to license their contibutions under arbitrary versions of the GFDL in the first place. The link on the article edit page used to go to a specific version of the GFDL.
Of course, it doesn't actually matter whether it is a legal move or not. Because no one wants to be the person who drags Wikipedia to court over this, they can implement the license change without fearing the law. Now, if you or I were to try something similar we'd find ourselves in court the next day. And that's why I think this is a bad thing for the Wikimedia foundation to do. Not because I dislike CC so much (I don't particularly) but because they're saying "the law doesn't apply to us", or phrasing it differently, they're advocating rule of force over rule of law. It may be that they've become sufficiently irreplacable that the law indeed does not fully apply to them anymore, but if they start exploiting that position to undermine either equality of law or the concept that people cannot be bound to contract terms they didn't agree to, they're doing society more long term harm than the good (however plentiful) their encyclopaedia has brought.
I contributed to Wikipedia because it was GFDL, so that I could get improved versions of my articles back with GFDL. Now, if someone incorporates CC-only third party content into an article, I cannot get it back with GFDL. Therefore this licence removes my ability to use content, and as such I am opposed to it and this is what I am going to vote for. I ask open content comrades who agree with me to oppose Wikimedia's proposed changes as well.
On a political level, I trust RMS and GNU far more than Lessig and CC. I support both, but RMS is who I really trust.
If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License âoeor any later versionâ applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
Because your GPL v666 is not published by the FSF, you cannot relicense existing GPL'd software under it.
Dangerous, sexy, turing complete: Femme Bots
without the protection of licenses, open source projects would get taken by companies, who would then sue people for using the stuff the company took.
linus chose a license, he didnt put it out there in the public domain, and he did it for a reason.
If the vote doesn't go the right way the first time, then the deletionists will just post the same request again and again until they win.
That's how Wikipedia works, right?
"Prohibited"? What kind of shitty university are you attending that imposes ridiculous restrictions about filtering web content?