Wikipedia Community Vote On License Migration

mlinksva writes "A Wikipedia community vote is now underway on migrating to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as the main content license for Wikimedia Foundation projects. This would remove a legal barrier to reusing Wikipedia content (now under the Free Documentation License, intended for narrow use with software documentation, because Wikipedia started before CC existed) in other free culture projects and vice versa."

Existing content?

[bcmm]

What about existing content? I don't recall being asked to allow my edits to be re-licensed later. Won't they face the same problem Linux would if it went to GPLv3?

Re:Existing content?

[shutdown -p now]

Neat legal hack...

I don't think that special-casing a specific corner case qualifies as "neat". But a hack it is, that's for sure.

Vote yes!

[bcrowell]

If you have a WP account with at least 25 edits before March 15, please vote yes on this. The only reason WP picked GFDL was that CC-BY-SA didn't exist when WP began. GFDL and CC-BY-SA are the same style of license; they're both GPL-ish as opposed to BSD-ish, because they both require derived works to be under the same license. GFDL sucks for a variety of reasons:

1. It's long.
2. It's got a windbaggy ideological preamble; people shouldn't be forced to put their support behind a particular politically loaded credo just because they want to contribute to WP.
3. Although GFDL can be a free license, it can also be a non-free license if you choose to use it with some of the optional parts like invariant subsections. This creates confusion, and has also caused lots of smart people to waste amazing amounts of time arguing and worrying about it, e.g., Debian wrangled for months before eventually deciding to exclude certain documentation that was under non-free versions of the GFDL.

CC-BY-SA is far more widely used at this point. Switching to CC-BY-SA eliminates legal hassles that would otherwise be involved in making derived workds using WP. As a concrete example, I wrote some CC-BY-SA-licensed books [lightandmatter.com], and when I want to use a photo or something from WP, the GFDL licensing creates hassles. I ended up having to dual-license the books, and that shouldn't be necessary. If people want to use the commons (both putting in and taking out), there shouldn't be artificial barriers to doing so.

Plenty of people have already posted about the legal aspects of why relicensing is possible, but the long and the short of it is that relicensing complies with both the letter and the spirit of the law. It complies with the letter of the law because of the later version clause. It complies with it in spirit because GFDL and CC-BY-SA are similar types of licenses, just implemented badly in one case and well in the other.

Pre-empting the inevitable cries of abuse

[staeiou]

I'll be the first to admit that this seems pretty tricky at first - that the GNU and Wikipedia could get together and retroactively re-license an entire project through the "later versions" clause. However, the later versions have to be "similar in spirit" to the original in order for this to happen. If they did this to re-license Wikipedia's GFDL content under the BSD license or the public domain, that would not be similar in spirit. The differences between the CCSA and the GFDL are minor, especially in the context of Wikipedia - which uses no front cover texts or invariant sections. The big one is the need to attach a copy of the license to the content (as opposed to a URI to the license) - it is a bit absurd that I've violated the GFDL by printing out a copy of a Wikipedia article and giving it to my students, because I didn't think to attach a copy of the GFDL to it.

Re:Vote early, vote often

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't do that. That undermines the attempt to derive an honest consensus. Also, when things have been voted on in the past they have then gone through and looked at the IP and useragent data and struck through any obvious sockpuppets. All you are doing is making more effort for everyone involved. Vote with a single account.

Do People Really Care?

[qazwart]

I've been in this business a long time. There are dozens. Heck, maybe hundreds of "Open Source Licenses", and I really can't tell the difference between them. There's Apache, GPL, Eclipse, CPL, QPL, and even BSD which get some people into raging fits.

Okay BSD is a bit different because you can -- in theory -- produce your own changes and keep those as proprietary. Apple did this with Mac OS X. However, they could have done pretty much the same thing with Linux too. Watch:

1). Company "X" submits to the Linux project some code changes that will allow Company "X" to hook its proprietary code into the Linux kernel. Completely legal according to the Linux GPL license.

2). These hooks would probably be rejected by the Linux project, but Company "X" could still use them although they'd be under the GPL license.

3). Company "X" now creates a proprietary layer on top of Linux using their GPL hooks to link it to the Kernel. The proprietary layer would sit above the GPL'd code and officially be separate from it.

The end result: Linux kernel under GPL, Company "X"'s special code that hooks into the proprietary layers under GPL, but not supported by the Linux project. Company "X"'s proprietary code on top not under GPL. A full OS. Yes, it's a bit more work than simply taking the basic BSD code, adding in proprietary changes directly into the kernel, but in the end, it's pretty much the same to the end user.

I use a lot of OSS software, and I support many OSS projects. But all this care and concern about licensing is unbelievable. Linux is Linux not because of the license, but because Linus Torvalds is a top rate project manager who knew what was important and what wasn't important.

Torvalds didn't jump on the microkernel bandwagon because he thought it the cool design wasn't worth the performance hit. Linus created his code to be X86 specific because it was faster that way.

Linus has carefully avoided all these piddling political wars about nonsense and has carefully focused his entire project and has kept his project from splitting apart in fratricidal wars that had engulfed the BSD world.

Yet, we get into these silly arguments. Was it worth the time and effort to create the GNOME project just because KDE depended upon a small set of propriety (even though freely licensed) QT Libraries? (BTW, I tend to use the GNOME desktop myself). What would the Linux desktop look like if the desktop environment wasn't split into two major camps and all that effort could have been put into building a full feature, yet friendly desktop?

In the end, it's all OSS and it's all good.

I think you missed the main reason for this

[Anonymous Coward]

A license change seemed inevitable to me, I read through the original GDFL and it didn't seem to be a very good fit for WiKipedia or it's sister projects. I was guessing there would be either through an addendum to the GDFL itself, or through a move to an entirely new license, now it seems we're getting both.

Several comments above are calling this a hack, but the way Wikipedia was placed under the GDFL seemed to be a hack to begin with. With the GDFL "...in any medium, that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this License", which (if I'm understanding correctly) states that for a work to be redistributed, the original authors need to have their name included along with a copy of the GDFL stating their agreement with it. Many authors weren't doing this as it was and article History tabs weren't really doing this properly either.

I have worked on several other WiKi based sites under different licenses in the past and one of the most rewarding parts was seeing an article I contributed to being translated into several different languages. I was disappointed when I created an account on Wikipedia to find out that this, although technically possible, wasn't always feasible under the GDFL, as with the license you had to go back through and obtain permission from all the original authors before it could be translated. To a degree, the GDFL was making the official WikiMedia projects incompatible with each other, let alone other sites under different licenses.

I had several documentation and book projects I had created in the past that I was looking to place on the official WikiMedia sites, but the attribution extremities of the GDFL kept me from moving them there. I can see the original GDFL working for small documentation projects, were you can get all the authors together to all agree on the license and establish an appropriate authors page, but for larger things such as Wikibooks and Wikipedia it created a lot of hassles.

Re:Vote yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's long.

WTF? This is your lead-off complaint? It's "long"?

... and, unlike CC-BY-SA, has to be appended to every document that reuses Wikipedia content, even if it's just a few paragraphs. Especially nice in print.

I think I'm going to vote no on this license change because the reasons presented here are very lame.

Compatibility alone is a good enough reason. Almost everybody uses CC nowadays, and not being able to combine two works created in the same share-alike-spirit just sucks.

Re:Correct

[Spasemunki]

You can make a derivative work from a public domain work and then license that under a more restrictive license. Happens all the time. Say, for instance, I was a creatively bankrupt entertainment company whose mascot was a disease carrying vermin. I could just dig up old public domain works- say, fairy tales, or stories by Victor Hugo- and make my own cinematic version of them- add a few musical numbers, perhaps. Then I assert copyright over the derivative work. Public domain doesn't travel with the content in the way the GFDL/CC licenses are- derivative works are considered new creations, provided that they are sufficiently different from the source.