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Wikipedia Moving From GFDL To Creative Commons License

Posted by timothy on from the please-discuss-in-the-talk-section dept.

FilterMapReduce writes "The Wikimedia Foundation has resolved to migrate the copyright licensing of all of its wiki projects, including Wikipedia, from the GNU Free Documentation License to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. The migration is scheduled to be completed on June 15. After the migration, reprints of material from the wikis will no longer require a full copy of the GFDL to be attached, and the attribution rules will require only a link to the wiki page. Also, material submitted after the migration cannot be forked with GFDL "invariant sections," which are impossible to incorporate back into a wiki in most cases. The GFDL version update that made the migration possible and the community vote that informed the decision were previously covered on Slashdot."

1 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Wikipedia does something right for a change by petrus4 · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    From the Licensing Update page http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update (Emphasis mine):-

    Motivation

    The core motivations for this proposed change are as follows:

            * We cannot currently share text (in either direction) with projects that use the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike Licenses. The Creative Commons licenses are used by hundreds of thousands of authors world-wide (see statistics), having quickly become the most widely used legal tool to release rights on works other than software. This interoperability barrier with other non-profit organizations and online communities who share knowledge freely is therefore counter to Wikimedia's mission.

            * The GFDL includes some potentially onerous provisions, such as the requirement to include the full license text with each copy. These requirements impede re-use of both text and multimedia (spoken or printed versions of articles, prints of images, etc.). Wikimedia is committed to the widest possible dissemination of free knowledge. While our terms of use have always allowed for lower barriers to re-use, their inconsistency with the license text leads to fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what is legal and what is not. It advantages those re-users who can afford legal advice and research over those who cannot. This is counter to Wikimedia's mission.

    The bold passage was one I found particularly relevant. Gotta love that freedom, eh Richard?

    Concerning my own personal message to the FSF regarding this decision, I think the great Duke Nukem said it best.

    "Eat shit and die." ;)