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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."
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.
...is this the start of the end of the GFDL?
My UID is prime. Is yours?
I just got off the phone with the big guy, you know, RMS himself. St. Ignacio or whatever.
And he's fucking pissed.
He said and I quote, "Looks like these fuckers don't know who they're dealing with. They need to be taught a lesson... freedom ain't free."
Apparently, he's planning on liberating wikipedia by force.
What does Richard Marx have to do with all of this?
He's the number one selling soul singer songwriter of the 80's!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
Good point. The original license does not account for the fluid nature of articles at wikipedia. From a legal perspective this seems like an improvement (IANAL though).
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
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.
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.
I'd read the article, but it's slashdotted :-[
Why can't individual contributors choose their licence like they can with Flickr?
Wikipedia is not a blog. It would become a format like urbandictionary.com or everything2.com: no rewriting and collaborating on content, rather single statements of various truthiness.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
It seems to me that the freedom nerds have ended up creating incompatible freedom licenses and have thus shackled themselves in such a way as to prevent them from sucking each other off.
That's a fairly accurate interpretation, yes. However, the point is that the CC licenses allow for mutual fellatio among a greater and more inclusive cross-section of nerds, while also involving less legal restrictions.
Some of us tend to view this as an extremely positive and beneficial thing, because after all, when we're talking about mutual oral sex between nerds, what's not to love?
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
RMS's opinion on the change.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
How did this minor piece of lawyering end up on a tech news site?
You mean as compared to the usual game reviews and Apple rumors?
#DeleteChrome
If you include the "or later" you're already allowing the license creators (in this case, the FSF) the ability to arbitrarily relicense your work, it's just that in this case the FSF decided the CC group was a trustworthy enough bunch to take care of that one from now on.
Frankly, I see no reason why you'd trust the FSF but not CC, and if you didn't trust the FSF already you should've left out the "or later" part in the first place. So personally, I see this as nothing more than a convenient opportunity to leave some of the licensing cruft that comes with the GFDL out of Wikipedia et al, and that's a big win for everyone.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
I used to go around and remove content that was cut and copied between pages by non original authors, because it violated the GFDL because the original authors information was not kept in the edit histories, naturally I was banned.
Why did you not just add the old history to the new history (either by putting it on the talk page with a link in the edit summary, adding it to the edit history, or by asking an admin to merge the histories for you)? You could have made your point, corrected the licensing situation, and not been trollish.
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
WP:POINT
Oh, and [citation needed].
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.