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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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
Wikipedia has a useful FAQ about the relicensing.
The parent post makes some good points about what was undesirable about the GFDL. In addition, there's the issue of needless proliferation of licenses. What everybody originally intended here was to make a commons that everyone could draw from. If A makes an animation, and B writes a song, and C performs B's song, and A, B, and C all try their best to put their work in the commons, then D should be able to come along and make a video consisting of A's animation with a sound track consisting of C's performance of B's song. There shouldn't be artificial obstacles just because A, B, and C chose different licenses.
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. But there is not a real philosophical difference between the GFDL and CC-BY-SA.
Find free books.
I only read Wikipedia for the articles.