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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."

5 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Existing content? by RobotRunAmok · · Score: 5, Funny

    I don't recall being asked to allow my edits to be re-licensed later.

    Think of your edits as free promotion for your concerts, and figure to make your money on T-Shirt sales.

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

    The CCSA is backwards compatible with the GFDL.

  3. Vote yes! by bcrowell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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:

    1. It's long.
    2. It's got a windbaggy ideological preamble; people shouldn't be forced to put their support behind a particular politically loaded credo just because they want to contribute to WP.
    3. Although GFDL can be a free license, it can also be a non-free license if you choose to use it with some of the optional parts like invariant subsections. This creates confusion, and has also caused lots of smart people to waste amazing amounts of time arguing and worrying about it, e.g., Debian wrangled for months before eventually deciding to exclude certain documentation that was under non-free versions of the GFDL.

    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.
  4. Wiki Voting by isnoop · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  5. Re:Vote early, vote often by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.