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

Might I be the first to say...

[Landak]

...is this the start of the end of the GFDL?

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

[orngjce223]

Not really, the GFDL is for things that are much longer, and y'know Wikipedia articles really aren't supposed to be very long (the one on the "United States" is about as big as they get).

Basically, imagine the GFDL tacked onto a five-sentence stub Wikpedia article about a town in France. Then imagine the GFDL tacked onto a hundred-page software manual. It's (proportionally speaking) a pretty big difference, which makes it very practical in the latter case but not in the former.