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Wikipedia Community Vote On License Migration

Posted by samzenpus on from the raise-your-hand dept.

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."

4 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. The "later version" clause by ErMaC · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. Backwards compatible by rhinokitty · · Score: 5, Informative

    The CCSA is backwards compatible with the GFDL.

  3. Re:Existing content? by bcmm · · Score: 4, Informative
    I should have voted before posting:

    "make all content currently distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License (with later version clause) additionally available under CC-BY-SA 3.0, as explicitly allowed through the latest version of the GFDL;"

    That clause seems to be written specially for Wikipedia:

    "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.
    ...
    The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.

    Neat legal hack...

    --
    # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
    Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
  4. Re:Vote yes! by DanielHast · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mod parent up. That's the basic idea: GFDL was never really designed for something like Wikipedia, and CC-BY-SA accomplishes the same thing much more elegantly while preserving the intent of the GFDL.

    One other issue is ease of compliance. The CC-BY-SA license only requires attribution "reasonable to the medium", including the author(s), title, and URI where applicable. The GFDL has the additional requirement that the entire text of the GFDL be included with every copy of any part of the work. This makes technical compliance much more difficult, and thus conflicts with Wikipedia's goal of widespread distribution in many mediums.