Wikipedia to be Licensed Under Creative Commons 188
sla291 writes "Jimmy Wales made an announcement yesterday night at a Wikipedia party in San Francisco : Creative Commons, Wikimedia and the FSF just agreed to make the current Wikipedia license compatible with Creative Commons (CC BY-SA). As Jimbo puts it, 'This is the party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia'."
Fantastic (Score:3, Informative)
Ahh, but they're actually changing the GFDL (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Strange... (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, RMS thinks that some of the licenses are great (the ones that allow redistribution, derivative works, and promote share-alike), but thinks others are terrible. RMS is famous for being careful with words, and dislikes the fact that when you say "this is available under a Creative Commons license" it basically means nothing (until you know which specific license is being used, you don't know what freedoms are being guaranteed).
Of course the FSF's intention is to promote freedom, whereas the Creative Commons organization has as its core mandate something more along the lines of "promote understanding of copyright law, and show copyright holders that they don't have to use a maximal, all-rights-reserved copyright, but that they can distribute under more permissive licenses, too." The creative commons organization emphasizes author choice instead of user freedom.
Still, all that having been said, there is some clear overlap between the CC licenses and the GPL. So, an appropriate license can certainly be compatible, and I'm fairly confident that RMS approves of those freedom-granting licenses.
Re:They can't (Score:1, Informative)
10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
"[...] If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation."
That's why the FSF is involved.
Modifying licenses (Score:5, Informative)
The whole notion of "or any future version" of the license, as is commonly used in GPL and GFDL licenses, has always worried me. IANAL, but from a legal standpoint, it seems odd that you can agree in a binding way to something which is yet to be defined.
Plus there's the (seemingly vanishingly small, at present) risk of the FSF being co-opted by some faction which changes the licenses in ways which make them entirely different in spirit to the current versions. That wouldn't mean the content wouldn't still be available under the current versions of the licenses (you can't un-license it once it's out there), but it could mean that forks could be made which were non-free. How do we know that, in say 40 years, the leadership of the FSF will be as principled and uncorruptible as the current leadership?
"compatible" with cc, not "switching to" (Score:4, Informative)
the op is no longer correct. the article has been updated to say that wikipedia will be cc-compatible, not that it will switch to it. to quote:
this is a bit of legal-hair-splitting (standard ianal disclaimer), but it does mean that there there shouldn't be any legal issues with converting prior content.
also it seems that the cc by-sa license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ [creativecommons.org] is basically equivalent to the gfdl. it is not "public-domain"ing the content, nor is it "bsd"ing the content. it just seems to make it a less-software-centric license. (anyone else, please feel free to correct.)
Re:Ahh, but they're actually changing the GFDL (Score:3, Informative)
Yes they did. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Modifying licenses (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Modifying licenses (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Difference? (Score:5, Informative)
Principally that the GFDL has some clauses that make odd but relatively minor requirements. It bars the makers of derivative works from removing any "invariant sections" from the original work (does not apply to Wikipedia). Distributing any GFDL work requires that you distribute with it a "transparent" copy of the entire license, which is impractical for a single printed Wikipedia article, for instance. But the core rights that the GFDL grants (duplication, derivative works, commerical or non-commercial use) are the same as those granted by CC-BY-SA. The GFDL just contains some "FSF-isms".
Appropriately enough, the Wikipedia article on the GFDL [wikipedia.org] includes a list of criticisms that cover this topic.
Re:Modifying licenses (Score:5, Informative)
If you include the "or any future version" clause, the politics of the FSF categorically do affect the licensing of your software, because it is the who FSF define the future versions of the license. Say I release SuperWidgetApp under GPL v2 with the "any future version" clause. Also say that down the line, bad people take over the FSF and make GPL v27, which has no requirement to release the source code. BadCorporation could then take the source to SuperWidgetApp, invoke the "any future version" clause and apply GPL v27; they can then make trivial changes, release it as HyperWidgetApp and not release the source (because under GPL v27, they don't have to). The GPL v2 - v26 versions would still be Free, but the modified version would not be.
The incompatibility starts here (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Modifying licenses (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not a lawyer, so this is pretty much worthless. But in my experience, most contracts or agreements have stuff that's vague or poorly defined in them, and when conflicts arise or businesses go broke, people fight tooth and nail over them.
For example, when people are forming a partnership for some new venture, they're usually not thinking about what happens if the thing busts out, or there's only enough salary to pay one instead of two, or whatever.
I'm sure lawyers could fight over that clause in the license. I don't know if they'd win. But I'm sure someone could try, and I'd be surprised if the outcome would be easy to predict even though the language in the license is clear. So to me -- and again, I'm not a lawyer, and the people who draft these licenses are a lot smarter than I am, so take this with a grain of salt -- it looks really dumb.
There's a thing that people do sometimes -- they'll have you sign some stupid form, or put up a sign that says, "not responsible for xxx." None of that is sturdy legally -- but they try to convince gullible people that they've lost before they've started.
Maybe that's what this is -- an attempt to sweep as many people along into the next generation of a license, by trying to convince them that they've already agreed to it. I hope that's not what they're doing here. But if they put that language in, and aren't confident that it would stand a challenge, then it kind of would be what they're doing.
And again, obviously, to head off the critics, I don't know what I'm talking about, so take it all with a giant grain of salt.
Lawyers, even the good guys, bring out the cynic in me.
Re:GPL by proxy (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Strange... (Score:3, Informative)
B) As far as your concerns about the "GPL virus," that is simply a matter of keeping your sources straight. Don't include GPL source if you don't want to release the source yourself. Simple. Most other software licenses, (everything but public domain) would require that you reimburse the author for your use, or whatever other condition they choose, so, this problem is not unique to the GPL. Basically, either write it yourself, or keep tabs on where the code comes from.
Re:Difference? (Score:5, Informative)
GFDL requires that so-called "Invariant Sections" (talking about the author and their relationship to the subject matter) be carried forward into future versions unchanged. Wikipedia articles don't have Invariant Sections, but you could take a Wikipedia article, change it, and then add an invariant section; everybody who wanted to use your changes would then have to keep the invariant section intact.
GFDL also requires that the title of the work be changed after every modification, and that sections titled "Acknowledgment" and "Dedication" be kept intact. Nobody really cares about these clauses, and Wikipedia has long ignored them.
If you want to redistribute a (modified) version of a work, the GFDL also requires that you accompany it with a copy of the GFDL and list at least five of the principal authors of the work on its title page. That's also widely ignored, by Wikipedia and others.
A work licensed under CC-BY-SA can be relicensed under any later version of CC-BY-SA and also under any license deemed equivalent by Creative Commons (since CC-BY-SA 3.0). A work licensed under GFDL can only be relicensed under a later version if the licensor explicitly added a clause to that effect; the Wikipedia license agreement contains such a clause, but a downstream distributor could remove it.
Not strange. Prose != source (Score:1, Informative)