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GFDL 1.3 Is Out, Allows Migration To CC
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Nov 04, 2008 06:38 AM
from the creative-commons-compatible dept.
from the creative-commons-compatible dept.
David Gerard writes "Version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License is out (FAQ). This license is little-used, except on the #8 site in the world: Wikipedia. And this version includes special provisions to re-license wiki-based content from GFDL to the much simpler Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0, as requested by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia plans to hold a public consultation process to decide whether and how to migrate to CC-BY-SA. The discussion is already running hot and heavy."
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Wikipedia Moving From GFDL To Creative Commons License 87 comments
FilterMapReduce writes "The Wikimedia Foundation has resolved to migrate the copyright licensing of all of its wiki projects, including Wikipedia, from the GNU Free Documentation License to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. The migration is scheduled to be completed on June 15. After the migration, reprints of material from the wikis will no longer require a full copy of the GFDL to be attached, and the attribution rules will require only a link to the wiki page. Also, material submitted after the migration cannot be forked with GFDL "invariant sections," which are impossible to incorporate back into a wiki in most cases. The GFDL version update that made the migration possible and the community vote that informed the decision were previously covered on Slashdot."
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Bewildered (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I the only one bewildered by the sheer number of different GNU/FOSS/Whatever-the-right-term-is licences in a field that strives for compatibility and standards?
Re:Bewildered (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Bewildered (Score:5, Insightful)
Before GFDL arrived nearly every software product had a different licence.
Wouldn't that be the GPL you're talking about? The GNU FDL is the license meant for doc, not src.
The general public license is a license that takes the ideas of the Bison public license, the Emacs public license plus some others, and puts those ideas into one license. The FSF then changed the licensing of Bison/Emacs/???/Profit to use the GPL rather than the [BE?P]PL.
And the GPL is a good thing. The problem is that we've been going back to the old days. Instead of emacs and bison, we have the Linux public license, the ZFS public license, the Apache public license, the Perl public license, the Python public license and the Firefox public license.
[Some of names have been changed to indict the guilty ;)]
Even if only counting the FSF licenses, we have a large amount. It means the compatibility matrix is huge, and entries can only be accessed in polynomial time by lawyers.
Parent
Re:Bewildered (Score:4, Funny)
It's also a community based on the premise that you have a right to "fork" things. Given that, it's hardly surprising that people invent their own licenses.
Parent
that's part of the point of this relicensing (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, Wikipedia was GFDL'd because the GFDL existed at the time. Since then, cc-by-sa has gotten a lot more momentum everywhere else, so it would be nice to move to it so content can be reused between Wikipedia and the many cc-by-sa books, websites, etc. that come out frequently.
The other reason is that the GFDL was designed for software manuals, so some of its technical requirements are highly impractical. You must reprint the entire GFDL text, which is several pages long, with any reuse. Fine if you're reprinting a book of 5,000 Wikipedia articles. But if you just want to print one on a flier, do you have to attach a pamphlet containing the GFDL text to every copy of the flier? And where the hell would you fit the list of all the article's authors, in the "History" section the GFDL requires you to maintain? Cc-by-sa has generally much more reasonable reuse requirements for all of this.
Parent
Re:that's part of the point of this relicensing (Score:4, Interesting)
The other issue is that no-one understands the GFDL. Not even the FSF. Really - you email licensing@fsf.org with a GFDL query, you will get back a response, three months later, saying "read the license text and consult with your attorney." Our attorney is Mike Godwin [wikimediafoundation.org] and it makes even his head hurt.
The FSF have given up making any sense of the license, so we can hardly be expected to.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Important question... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Important question... (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedia was started before Creative Commons existed. The only good free text licence at the time was the GFDL. All content on Wikipedia is thus currently GFDL licensed.
The 1.3 update to the GFDL allows for Wikipedia to switch to Creative Commons if it so wishes.
So, GNU is the good guys here.
Parent
I'm confused (Score:4, Interesting)
Since the license was released on 03 Nov 2008, you would not have been able to put a document on a wiki before then. So is this a reward for people who broke the licensing agreements, an amnesty or what?
on purpose to protect existing GFDL authors (Score:5, Informative)
This is basically a special-case clause to let Wikipedia get out of the GFDL and relicense itself to cc-by-sa, because the GFDL turns out to be highly impractical for Wikipedia and especially for any meaningful reuse of its content.
The date clause is designed to prevent someone from using this as a way to relicense all GFDL content that has ever been created, by laundering it through Wikipedia. Since you didn't know about this license until too late, you can't now go take a GFDL software manual, paste it into Wikipedia, and say this allows you to relicense it. Since people who wrote manuals years ago were not expecting to have their work relicensed in this way, the FSF felt compelled to avoid that outcome.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree that the GFDL "turns out to be highly impractical for Wikipedia" or "any meaningful reuse of its content"
This is just a bunch of people who are religious zealots about the Creative Commons licensing suite who are upset that they can't just re-license the content of Wikipedia into whatever other content license they choose, and hate the viral nature of the Free Software Foundation license suite.
The politics of this simply turn my stomach, even if there are some "legitimate" issues about the GFDL t
Re: (Score:2)
that's not why this change is being made (Score:3, Informative)
It really is a practicality problem for "meaningful reuse of its content". If you have to staple the entire text of the GFDL to a short article that you hope to print on a flier, you effectively can't reuse that article on a flier. What's more, no reuser can be confident that they're even doing it legally, even if they're willing to take heroic measures. The FSF will not say what the GFDL means as applied to Wikipedia. What is the History section? What is a derived version? What is the Title Page? When it s
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why not? (Score:4, Interesting)
The GFDL is based on the narrow politics of the FSF, while CC was created to allow people to choose what restrictions they want on their work.
I'm not sure the wholesale changing of license under author's noses is great, but if they wrote in the GPL suggested "version x or later" clause, well...they agreed to it already. Which is why I don't like giving other people blank contracts. I probably wouldn't have minded if I had donated something as GFDL, but the implications are scary. Said clause gives them permission to do just about anything. Few people I would trust this way.
Re: (Score:2)
Hello!
The "Stalin attitude" of Stallman's, that you mention in your sig, what does it refer to? I don't want to start a flame war, or even oppose you, I just thought that hearing your point of view might adjust my own opinion.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure the wholesale changing of license under author's noses is great, but if they wrote in the GPL suggested "version x or later" clause, well...they agreed to it already.
If I release software under GPL2+, anyone who gets it from me will have to use it under either v2 or v3. Any license released by the FSF can only make the software more free, in the sense of "more like BSD-licensed".
If the GPLv3 allows for a different set of restrictions, that's in some ways stricter than GPLv2, and people redistribute my code under v3 only, then it becomes less free for those who take it: they have to abide by v3.
If the FSF wants to convert my project to v3-only, they basically have to ou
It even _sounds_ simpler too! (Score:3, Insightful)
Much simpler to just say "oh, you know, it's under a plain old Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0".
(I'm kidding, I actually consider this important, it's just that catchy names isn't FOSS' people strongest point
Re:It even _sounds_ simpler too! (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I like the CC name as it quite clearly describes what it's providing. That it's OK to share if you provide attribution and share under the same terms as the liecnse.
Parent
Practical problem with all CC licenses (Score:2)
That it's OK to share if you provide attribution and share under the same terms as the liecnse.
Under all Creative Commons licenses, an upstream copyright owner can require you to remove his name from all further copies of the work. For example, see CC-by-sa 3.0 [creativecommons.org] under "remove from the Adaptation any credit". That requirement makes CC licenses incompatible[1] with other licenses that require that copyright notices be preserved. Even not considering compatibility, it can create a logistical nightmare.
Two licenses are "compatible" iff they allow works under those licenses to be combined into a larger
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I like the CC name as it quite clearly describes what it's providing.
It quite clearly describes the broad idea, 10 kilofoot view of what it gives.
Would you sign an ISP contract just because it was named monthly-payment-good-network-citizen? That's pretty much what all ISPs want: money in return for providing a good service that isn't being abused.
An even worse example is Linux Genuine Advantage.
The devil is in the details. Don't trust that you will like the details, just because the words used to gloss over them sound nice.
My take. (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't looked at this new version of the GFDL yet, but previous versions were simply too complicated for my purposes. I'm not publishing a book, I don't need to worry about front and back covers etc.
I refuse to use CC licences at all either. Which licence? You can use this under the CC licence? Which one? The BY-SA-UK version 1.2 one. The what? Exactly.
Not to mention, in some of the licence terms (depending on which country I think), there are non-free restrictions. For example, not allowed to use the text to libel or some such.
Creative Commons encourages people (both "creators" and users) not to read licences, not to know that their rights are, and generally be ignorant.
What do I do instead? Something simple. Something like:
I get across the point that I want my work to be used, but only on the condition that the copyright line stays, and that downstream viewers of the work have the same right to use and modify the work.
And that is all that is needed for the vast majority of things that I have ever "published" (including photographs).
Just want to point out.. (Score:3, Funny)
"Stallman is hard to deal with" (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia is the crown jewel of GFDL. But - GFDL was really originally written to deal with technical documentation to accompany GPL software, not to deal with content on wikis etc. But it seemed like a good license when Wikipedia started so they used it. There is also a lot of Creative Commons content out there that Wikipedia wants to work with, and the GFDL provisions made working everything together difficult.
So what does Stallman do? He magnaminously allows the crown jewel of using GFDL to move towards the CC world, if Wikipedia wants. Can we imagine Microsoft, or SCO or proprietary licensed software companies doing this? No. And it is helping the digital commons community, although from now on Stallman and the FSF will not being getting kudos for the license for Wikipedia content from now on, because Stallman was so gracious about it.
There is a difference between holding to your principles, and being stubborn just for the sake of ego or whatever. Stallman has always held to his principles regarding freedom. But here is an example of him working with others, and being flexible, to help the greater cause of the digital commons. I have to read for years about how inflexible Stallman supposedly is, here is an example to the contrary. Because Stallman is flexible, he is only inflexible about his principles and about freedom.