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'."
Won't make any difference (Score:3, Insightful)
Good luck with that.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Literate programming (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Strange... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll concede that both sorts of people are necessary, although I certainly know which one I'd put my money behind.
Re:Modifying licenses (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh come now, it's not like that [wikipedia.org] has ever happened before.
Re:Good luck with that.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good luck with that.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if you're a big muckety-muck in the Greater Wiki Community; maybe you are, in which case I risk making a huge ass of myself. (I tried Googling for you, but all I kept coming up with was your many UserPages.) And, of course, it's always sad when people feel slighted or disenfranchised. That said:
I feel fairly certain that anyone who, by comparison to his own views, considers Richard Stallman and the FSF to be a bunch of money-grubbing, compromising, unprincipled corporate hacks is someone whose writing I'm not going to miss.
Re:They can't (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt that very much. CC-BY-SA and GFDL are identical in spirit and intent; GFDL just has lots of clauses that are designed for software documentation and very awkward for a wiki. I don't believe that any good-faith Wikipedia contributor who has read and understood both licenses will reject CC-BY-SA in favor of GFDL.
However, I also don't doubt that many disgruntled former Wikipedia contributors will claim that they disagree with this license change, just to troll and cause trouble. Since they have no legal standing, they can be safely ignored.
Re:Strange... (Score:4, Insightful)
Me too. Years of observation has shown (time and again) that all those wacky things RMS warns about generally come true a year or two later. An idealist with a good sense of how human nature and "the market" works is a powerful powerful thing. Not all idealists are sitting in the meadow chasing dandelions.
Alternatively you might pigeon-hole him as a very in-touch cynic. In that sense consider RMS's fanaticism of protecting Freedoms from the point of view of never underestimating the creativity and number of sleazy people out there ready to make to quick buck and rip you off if they can.
Re:Difference? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you add an invariant section, the legal requirement for keeping those invariant sections is only to those whom you distribute that new version of the content after this modification. It doesn't apply to earlier versions...and Wikipedia would as a matter of custom delete any invariant sections and material that would have to be kept.
But on the whole, you are largely correct that Wikipedia does ignore this section of the GFDL by simply prohibiting as a matter of policy the creation of any invariant sections. There may be some GFDL'd content that was added to Wikipedia which contained invariant sections... and that content would either have to be deleted, or be in technical violation of the terms of the GFDL. The problem here is that there is, comparatively speaking, so little actual content outside of Wikimedia projects written using the GFDL that this is usually not a problem for copyright violation situations.
I've complained about how the terms of this requirement might actually be met using the current interface on Wikipedia and the MediaWiki software. All of the raw information necessary to meet this requirement is kept on the servers, but it is not very easy to access and a pain to try and obtain. There is also no simple mechanism to distinguish between a vandal whose edits have been completely removed, and a serious contributor who has added some very real meat to the articles. Most lists of authors on Wikipedia articles include not only the "principal authors" but also vandals, crackpots, sysops (who clean up the mess from vandals), and people stopping by to fix the spelling of just one or two words.
The GFDL is also very weak in its formal definition over what might even constitute an author at all, and it is very possible that Willy on Wheels (look it up on Wikipedia if you don't know him) could get equal credit with RMS on the article regarding the Free Software Foundation. But that is a problem with the GFDL, not Wikipedia.
This is, however, something I've paid careful attention to when I've distributed Wikimedia content outside of the Wikimedia projects themselves. And that is something I have done... not just talked about.
Re:Strange... (Score:3, Insightful)
For one, RMS needs to hire a good PR frontman, or start practicing good hygiene and work on his interpersonal skills if he wants to be taken seriously, or to lead a socially-responsible revolution.... otherwise, you start to look like Michael Moore.
I will easily concede that CC would almost certainly not have happened without RMS and the GPL (and I really *do* appreciate the original visionaries for that). However, CC is presented in a manner that's much more easily digested by artists and the public.
CC does not mandate that works are necessarily free, although it *does* give the artists a great degree of flexibility over how they want their work to be displayed, presented, or shared. It's a very nice transition between draconian copyright measures, and total freedom of information.
Hopefully we'll transition to a more free society, but this is a transition that will take a long time to occur, and I think that CC is perhaps our greatest hope for this actually happening without drastic measures.
It's really easy for this to slip into a socialism vs. communism debate. Within any "revolution", there are concessions that have to be made, and it's always a tough call where to draw the line. Personally, I think that we'll continue to have a balance of GPL, LGPL, and BSD-style, CC, etc... licenses, as each suits a rather specific purpose.
(The "future" clause absolutely seals the deal, making the GPL completely and totally unacceptable, and is completely contrary to the spirit of the FSF, not to mention being wide open to abuse)
Re:Strange... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it silly to enter into a debate on which license is the best, I fully agree that authors having a full quiver of licenses to choose from is a good thing as different situations and personalties will warrant the need for a different license.
I think you misread it. There is no binding "future" clause in the license.
Term 9 of the GPLv2 states:
"9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions
of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will
be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to
address new problems or concerns.
Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program
specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any
later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions
either of that version or of any later version published by the Free
Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of
this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software
Foundation."
It is explicitly up to the author to state the license (thus version) used in their statement of copyright. If the author states "GPL version 2" then it is v2 and only v2. If they say ">=v2" then you, as the user, have the option to use "any future version" of GPL from the FSF. The FSF states that the reason they ask for >= is to avoid zombie code in case there is some legal bug found in the GPLv2 one day rendering it invalid, and the author has since disappeared.
If you have ceded your copyright onto the FSF (as they ask), well then it's their choice. But if you say "GPL version 2" and you retained the copyright, then it is that and that only.