Wikipedia Moving From GFDL To Creative Commons License

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."

Comments

For those playing at home

[tepples]

Like the GNU Free Documentation License, the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license is a free, copyleft license designed for works other than computer programs. It just lacks some of the practical problems that come with the GNU FDL, which was designed specifically for software manuals that run dozens of pages long. Individual encyclopedia articles are much shorter than that, and the ability to incorporate the license by reference is a better match for Wikimedia Foundation's uses. But the Creative Commons licenses have some of their own practical problems, such as requiring distributors to remove an upstream author's credit upon request.

Re:For those playing at home

[buchner.johannes]

GNU FDL was chosen as CC was not available at the time. Now CC has additionally become an accepted standard with a lot of material out there. It is great news as this makes it easier to mix content from and to their projects.

Re:For those playing at home

[Carnildo]

Was it the license that was preventing a downloadable dump of Wikipedia from being distributed on an iPhone?

No, it's the size. A text dump of the current version of the English Wikipedia (no images, no history) is 45 GB.

Re:For those playing at home

[atomicthumbs]

Or 4.7 gigs compressed, if you only download the articles.

Re:For those playing at home

[tepples]

I'm not saying there should only be one free-as-in-speech license for written materials. We do need at least two, because there are real philosophical differences between BSD-style licenses and GPL-style licenses.

CC-BY and CC-BY-SA appear to nicely fit the roles you mention. But the credit removal requirement in even CC-BY might cause license incompatibility if a free program under a GNU license uses CC-BY images, audio, etc. Or am I misreading the definition of "aggregate" in the GPL?

Re:For those playing at home

[Max Littlemore]

Hear hear. Now that this decision has been made, how long until the full transition occurs? It certainly looks like a much better choice. From the *wikipedia page on the Creative Commons licenses:

"Some within the copyleft movement argue that only the Attribution-ShareAlike license is actually a true copyleft license [24] and that there is no standard of freedom between Creative Commons licenses (as there is, for example, within the free software and open source movements). [25] An effort within the movement to define a standard of freedom has resulted in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.[26] In February 2008, Creative Commons recognized the definition and added an "Approved for Free Cultural Works" badge to its two Creative Commons licenses which comply -- Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. "

So Attribution-ShareAlike is a true copyleft license, but how long until we can reuse bits of wiki without having to include a full license?

------

*The quoted material from wikipedia is reposted under the GNU Free Documentaion License. A full copy of the license is included below to comply with the licensing requirements.

GNU Free Documentation License
Version 1.3, 3 November 2008

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

0. PREAMBLE
The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.

This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license designed for free software.

We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. But this License is not limited to software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.

1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
This License applies to any manual or other work, in any medium, that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this License. Such a notice grants a world-wide, royalty-free license, unlimited in duration, to use that work under the conditions stated herein. The "Document", below, refers to any such manual or work. Any member of the public is a licensee, and is addressed as "you". You accept the license if you copy, modify or distribute the work in a way requiring permission under copyright law.

A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work containing the Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into another language.

A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. (Thus, if the Document is in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal, commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding them.

The "Invariant Sections" are certain Secondary Section

Re:For those playing at home

[Teancum]

I assume this includes all the talk pages, user profile pages, votes for deletion pages, nerd rage about pictures of a human turd and pages outlining wikipedia policies right?

This is a fair question, actually, even if it is posed in a rough AC manner.

The short answer is yes, it includes all of these other pages as well, including stuff subject to deletion and spam put on Wikipedia by vandals.

That doesn't make goatse.cx now available under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license, but it does make this page available under those terms, and any side commentaries on the topic as well, even if it is otherwise off-topic on other pages of Wikipedia.

Re:I didn't RTFA

[jrumney]

Wikipedia is very different from a file upload site like Flickr, in that each page is not the work of one individual, but the combined work of many. Consistent licensing is essential - noone wants to have to check all the licenses of previous edits before they add their own to ensure that no license conflict happens.

Re:Wikipedia does something right for a change

[FilterMapReduce]

Well, the migration couldn't have happened if the FSF didn't sign off on the change; they were the only ones with the authority to make an update to the GFDL allowing it. Although it seems that the FSF's decision came out of a negotiation that took place back in 2007, so perhaps it wasn't really their idea and it was more a matter of bowing to pressure from the masses. Also, I have no idea how RMS personally felt about it.

I definitely agree that the GFDL was totally unsuitable for Wikipedia.

Re:Wikipedia does something right for a change

[TheRaven64]

It is slightly chilling for anyone using another FSF license. You can omit the 'or later versions' license and have the possibility that the later versions of other FSF licenses will be incompatible with your version (e.g. LGPLv3 is incompatible with GPLv2; good luck if you were working on a GPLv2-only project that depended on a library that has moved from LGPLv2-or-later to LGPLv3-or-later). Or you can include it and have the possibility that the FSF will decide to grant an exemption for a specific large organisation and allow them to relicense your work.

Re:Okay

[David Gerard]

RMS actually thinks it's a good idea :-)

Re:Wikipedia does something right for a change

[David Gerard]

RMS's opinion on the change.

Re:I didn't RTFA

[Carnildo]

Is existing GFDL content compatible with the CC licence?

I think (please correct me) what they did was write a GFDL version compatible with the CC. Then they upgraded the licence of the existing content and thus now they can switch over to CC.

Close: Wikipedia was licensed under the GFDL version 1.2 or later. What the FSF did was write version 1.3 with a clause saying that any GFDL-licensed wiki (with safeguards to prevent license-washing) could be re-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0.

Re:Might I be the first to say...

[Kjella]

Everything you said is correct except you gave no real reason why the GFDL should continue to exist. You're free to include the full CC license too if you feel like, and if you only did it by reference I doubt many would care. The CCs have pretty much become the standard for any type of free non-code material, and I can't see any good reason why software documentation should need a special license different from any other text.

Re:Scary power....

[Chlorine Trifluoride]

WP:POINT

GFDL has invariant sections

[tepples]

I've been caught in the trap of referencing one license by shorthand when it really is another license that is being discussed

You mean like the GPL vs. the LGPL?

Or to put it more bluntly, there is no "Creative Commons license".... there is a whole bunch of 'em and they are mostly incompatible with each other.

FSF had the same problem with the Open Publication License: the basic license was free, but it allowed option A (no derivatives) and option B (non-commercial), either of which made a work using it non-free.

At least if you were referencing the GFDL, you knew you were talking about a specific document that was well defined without this sort of ambiguity.

The GFDL has its own non-free option, and it is called Invariant Sections.