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'."
Re:Strange... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not a simple question. For instance, it is ironic to note that you cannot legally include GPL code in a document licensed under the GNU Free[sic] Documentation License.
Re:Strange... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Good luck with that.... (Score:2, Interesting)
So Mr. Wales and Mike Godwin strong-armed the Free Software Foundation into using the "or later version" clause of the GFDL to change it to one of the Creative Commons licenses... more or less.
This would be like (well, not quite like, but this gets close to the point) the Free Software Foundation changing the GPL to be "more compatable with the Microsoft EULA". And RMS gets his own private space station paid for by Gates, and sent into space by a Paul Allen spacecraft.
Yeah, that's real freedom alright!
Trust me when I say that the shit has just hit the proverbial fan right now, and it isn't going to be pretty to see what the fallout of this is going to be like. I'm going to have to unsubscribe from the Foundation mailing list as this one announcement is going to reverberate with negative feelings from many Wikimedia users like there is no tomorrow.
I know this is a good intention on the part of everybody involved, but the Wikimedia Foundation is very much out of touch with their main user base, and has been for some time. Mike Godwin told me that my contributions may be removed from Wikipedia (all 1400 or so edits... I have no idea how that is going to be accomplished) if I object to this new license arrangement. It will be interesting to see what is going to happen.
It might be enough to cause a major fork of Wikipedia if this isn't dealt with in a judicious manner.
Re:Strange... (Score:3, Interesting)
If I say a piece of software is Open Source or Free Software, you have a rough idea of what you can do with it.
If I say a work is available under a Creative Commons license, I haven't told you anything because the licenses are so diverse.
About time (Score:3, Interesting)
GPL by proxy (Score:3, Interesting)
Free Software Foundation is a charity. I don't think a 501(c)(3) organization can be the target of a typical hostile takeover, unlike a publicly traded corporation. What kind of co-opting do you envision?
Besides, I could see GFDL 1.3 adopting a "proxy" provision similar to that of GPLv3 and LGPLv3:
Re:GPL by proxy (Score:3, Interesting)
So now anyone who was stupid enough to put "or later" in their GPLv2 code has lost all control over its licensing and given the FSF ultimate power. And I think most people who have been around the block enough to have any degree of wisdom would have a problem with that.
Re:Ahh, but they're actually changing the GFDL (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure that "didn't RTFA because it was a blog" approach is entirely fair; after all, why trust an ultra- (and often inaccurately-) summarized blog entry (ie. the slashdot summary) more than a complete one?
Great news for open educational resources! (Score:2, Interesting)
There's no reason that content should be in separate BY-SA and GFDL silos. It's critically important to be able to remix it together.
Re:Strange... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you say a work is available under a Creative Commons license, you are talking about one of many possible combinations of all CC restrictions. If you, however, say a work is available under a cc-by-nc-sa license, you have told me I may use your work in mine as long as you are attributed, my works aren't comercially and my works are available under cc-by-nc-sa. The five other possibilites are similarly easy to understand.
Re:Good luck with that.... (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW, it was Mike Godwin who was telling me that I could remove my contributions, after a long and drawn out thread where I simply said that I insist that my contributions remain under the GFDL, and not a CC license.
As for RMS being a money grubber... I know that seems out of character here. It certainly seems rather bizzare that it would be Jimbo Wales making this announcement instead of RMS that one of the key FSF licenses is undergoing a major change. Where is RMS in all of this? It is also very much out of character for him (RMS) to stay quiet about something this major coming from the FSF. Perhaps that will be the next
I've had some deep reservations about some of the actions of Jimbo based on how he is operating his very much for-profit Wikia organization. My major concern is how he has been squashing Wikimedia projects that might be in competition with his for-profit websites, and killing some rather interesting and creative concepts that have risen through the muck to become likely sister Wikimedia projects.
I guess I'm concerned that this is a done deal, and not trying to float a suggestion that perhaps it would be a good idea to merge the two licenses to gague what the community opinions on this would be. I heard about discussions were going on a couple of weeks ago, but I thought those would take quite a bit more time to resolve the fine points.
A back-room deal, even with the very best of intentions, is still a back-room deal. While many of the philosophies of this particular CC license are along parallel paths to the GFDL in many ways, there still are some substantial goals of the GFDL that are being given up. And I'm still not completely sure what is being gained here by harmonization. That is something I really don't see here, other than they have gone and suddenly dual-licensed Wikimedia content that was previously available only under one type of content license. And dual-licensing that content without really getting input from those who have contributed that content in any major form.
This is not just a tweak of the GFDL to help clean up some of the very real problems of the GFDL, and there are some very real problems that do need to be resolved.
There really isn't too much I can do about this right now anyway, so I'll have to "wait and see" what the political fallout is going to be. There will be some, of that I have no doubt.
Re:Strange... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's good that some companies can make money on services and support (Red Hat etc), but that doesn't work everywhere.
There needs to be an open source license that gives you everything the GPL does, but only to people who paid for the software. Anyone who has a license for the software can modify it all they want, give out their modifications and even complete modified versions, but only to others who have a license for the software.
Re:Strange... (Score:4, Interesting)
Years of observation has shown (time and again) that all those wacky things RMS warns about generally come true a year or two later.
It's funny you say that. I would have said exactly the opposite. My years of observation have shown (time and again) that the software world carries on developing new things for commercial, charitable and personal use purposes, without any great disaster happening because it isn't all licensed under something like the GPL.
Meanwhile, all the claimed benefits of the GPL have turned out to be rather shallow in practice. Forking of major projects happens relatively rarely. Most end users of most software don't really want to be able to hack the code (not least because most of them wouldn't even know where to start). Those who are willing to share their work with the community get tied up in silly arguments over the technicalities of the licences in question, and that problem has been made worse by the introduction of the GPL2 vs. GPL3 debate. The entire OSS world has not collapsed under the weight of patent claims, nor is it ever likely to with or without GPL3's help for the simple reason that many major businesses now rely on it and they have patents of their own to fight back with, just as everyone in the commercial world has done for years.
On the whole, with due respect to his past achievements, I'd say these days RMS talks a lot but often comes across badly and isn't particularly relevant in the modern software development world. I'd back the pragmatist every time.
Source code for images and audio (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Strange... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmmm... This is a good thought here.
The closest that I've seen to something like this is what the old Borland did with the original Delphi source code. It still belonged to Borland, but they gave you the complete source code for nearly the entire compiler, and in theory you were permitted to share changes to that source code with anybody else who bought a licensed copy of that compiler. It in fact was a fairly common practice among Delphi programmers.
They also did something that was fairly unusual for compiler writers (although fairly common now): They explicitly granted license for the libraries for you to use in any way you wanted... as long as you gave them only others who paid for the license. And the binaries were completely free of copyright restrictions for the end-user (meaning the software developer/publisher). You don't worry about this with GCC, but other major compilers did have some pretty profound restrictions on how you were "allowed" to redistribute your software once it ran through their compiler... or be required to pay some sort of licensing fee for the library files needed to run your software.
An "open source" license like you are talking about still doesn't deal with what happens to abandonware, which IMHO is one of the real strengths of the GPL: If MySQL A.B. goes completely out of business, the MySQL software will still be available from many sources, and you will even be able to find people willing to make patches for the software and make future updates and releases. There is no GPL'd abandonware, other than the thought that a particular development group has disbanded (like the ReiserFS group run by Han Reiser).
Requiring somebody to purchase a license from a single entity of some sort gives a worry that the people collecting the money from the licenses may not be available if you don't have the license and really need the software. Under this sort of arrangement, how would you solve this problem without resorting to something like the GPL?
Not yet, anyway.... (Score:3, Interesting)
As I write this, there is no official new version of the GFDL. It would have to be announced by the FSF, and it isn't. The FSF website says nothing about this, and the Gnu Project website lists the 2002 version as the latest.
This seems fishy in other ways. I could say the FSF was diligent in soliciting comments for GPLv3, but "diligent" seems like too soft a word. It would seem odd to change the GFDL with no advance notice whatsoever.
Not to mention, it seems unlikely that this is the third best moment of Lessig's life (after two things involving his wife, which I don't think we need details on). (Yes, I did RTFA, what there was of it. Wanna cancel my /. license?)
This smells like a hoax or prank to me. However, I'm going to look at www.fsf.org [fsf.org] and www.gnu.org [gnu.org] next week and see if there is anything to this.
Re:Strange... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not let the users choose their licence? (Score:3, Interesting)
As a user and contributor [wikipedia.org] (and donor) of Wikipedia I prefer GFDL. Not that I don't like CC. But my first preference is GFDL, and CC is my second preference, that's all. Oh, and I actually dislike the idea of "any future versions" even in GFDL/GPL although I do see practical advantages. However, I also see practical advantages in GFDL-CC compatibility, as now many people will be able to mix Wikipedia content with CC-only content which is a good thing. What would be a BAD thing would be a total CC switch by Wikipedia and the departure from GFDL.
So, I essentially do welcome this compatibility but only marginally... In fact I don't want to see the Wikipedia community getting away from the FSF and the GNU's focus on idealism and purity. I'm an FSF Contributing Member as well, so maybe I'm just a bit biased, but that's just how I feel. Perhaps the future will prove that the GFDL-CC compatibility is more good than bad.
What I don't understand, however, is why it's the Wikimedia or a group of admins who get to choose licences, and not let the users themselves one-by-one do it. Wiki articles emerge after a series of edit wars and vandalisms, and yet they are readable and useful. Meaningfull and useful articles emerge even when large groups of trolls try to bring chaos. What if each wiki article had its own licence decided by the initial contributor? Trolls would surely use this to bring more chaos, and users with no knowledge would also do stupid things, but in the end I believe that useful articles would still emerge, and the licence would be the choice of the community as a whole rather than a few people with lots of social capital or prominence in the wiki community.
I believe a wiki must be built by its users rather than by a core admin team... that's the spirit of the wiki. So, why on earth should the admins force users to either accept a predefined licence or not contribute? This idea led me to allow my users on my wiki [wikinerds.org] to choose the licence of their choice for the pages they create. Yeah I know at some point we will have a crazy mix of incompatible licences, but it is up to the users and their collective intelligence to decide how to use the feature of licensing choices. In the end I believe users as a community will make intelligent choices. That's the spirit of the swarm intelligence, after all, which is also the field of my academic research for my Master's... Give users some guidance, some rules of behaviour, apply the minimally possible central administration and let them free to do as they like.
I'd welcome the idea of letting users decide the licence they would like to be implemented in Wikipedia as well. Perhaps this could help more people to understand what licences are, and also see themselves how unreasonable the current copyright laws are, so perhaps more citizens could start demanding their representatives to start thinking about copyright reform or its total eradication... in my opinion copyright could be replaced by laws built on top of moral rights of authors where everyone is allowed to copy anything but only if the original author is prominently cited and credited. The more ordinary citizens get exposed to the silliness of copyright, the more they will demand changes from their governments.
Wikipedia could start doing that right now very easily. It just needs to remove the site-wide GFDL notice or add an "except where otherwise indicated" note after it, and then apply individual copyright notices on each article that is not GFDL. Of course, to maintain the freedom and the spirit of copyleft, Wikipedia and other wikis willing to use this approach could accept only a specific set of licences that meet certain criteria. For example, articles could be allowed to be either under the GFDL, the CC-By-SA, or the Free Art Licence, or any lcience in the spirit of DFSG, etc..
We have that for a long time (Score:3, Interesting)
That exists for, literally, decades.
VMS licensees could get the VMS sources for a nominal service fee (which in that days consisted of a hefty chunk of cash). I remember a small box, approx. 6x8x10 cms when I was working for an investment bank in '89. This box contained the VMS source code on microfilm, likely including DECnet stuff and other good shit.
As far as I know there where very few things excluded (LAT comes to mind).
Of course the intention was not to enable customers to write a VMS derivative (good luck on that) and grace the world with it, but basically for troubleshooting and for documentation of some of the more low level parts of your computing environment.
I don't believe that such a deal is completely unique in the enterprise software world. A milder form of it is, for example, source code escrow.