Wikipedia Community Vote On License Migration 95
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."
Re:Existing content? (Score:3, Interesting)
Neat legal hack...
Or a clear violation of basic FLOSS principles like "No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups", depending on how you look at it since it discriminates against everyone not Wikipedia. If the FSF can do that, there's in principle nothing against releasing a GPL4 that said "You have the right to relicense to BSD, as long as you're Richard Matthew Stallman". Or just make an equally bullshit definition that fits just him. Despite their good intentions I think it sets a bad precedent that is much broader.
Re:Existing content? (Score:2, Interesting)
The GFDL is not intended or suited to be used for Wiki articles; it is for documentation, and includes terms and options that not only render it a non-free license but also present practical issues for a Wiki.
If you use a license for something totally outside its intended scope, you should not be surprised if future versions are problematic for you, or if their workaround is to allow a different license (altogether) to be used instead.
Wikipedia article pages are not software. And the FSF don't single out or discriminate against Wikipedia specifically, in the relicense option.
However, they do effect time-based discrimination on projects that haven't been created yet.
Suddenly after that magic date Aug 1, 2009, certain rights automatically get revoked from you.
That's a timebomb, and a horrible idea. They should have at least instead published a new license revision 1.4, that would allow document authors to exclude the relicense right by utilizing the new version of the license.
You're right, but it's worse than that (Score:1, Interesting)
You're right. At least under Dutch law, the clause would be illegal. For it to be legal, Wikipedia should either have explicitly asked their contributors to give up any copyright claims to their contributions, which they did not do (in fact Wikipedia explicitly stated that contributors kept their copyright, allowing relicensing of their own contributions if they wanted), or it should have included some kind of termination clause, granting contributors the right to opt out of the license switch. American law may work differently though.
That being said, contributors were never asked to license their contibutions under arbitrary versions of the GFDL in the first place. The link on the article edit page used to go to a specific version of the GFDL.
Of course, it doesn't actually matter whether it is a legal move or not. Because no one wants to be the person who drags Wikipedia to court over this, they can implement the license change without fearing the law. Now, if you or I were to try something similar we'd find ourselves in court the next day. And that's why I think this is a bad thing for the Wikimedia foundation to do. Not because I dislike CC so much (I don't particularly) but because they're saying "the law doesn't apply to us", or phrasing it differently, they're advocating rule of force over rule of law. It may be that they've become sufficiently irreplacable that the law indeed does not fully apply to them anymore, but if they start exploiting that position to undermine either equality of law or the concept that people cannot be bound to contract terms they didn't agree to, they're doing society more long term harm than the good (however plentiful) their encyclopaedia has brought.
Re:Existing content? (Score:3, Interesting)
That creates a problem of its own, in that it locks the project into the current version of the license.
A much more sensible option should be to redirect the "or later" clause to yourself: rewrite the GPL in your code to be updated by you, instead of "as published by the FSF". That way you keep some control of your project as the original creator, and don't doom it to have an eventually obsolete license.