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GFDL 1.3 Is Out, Allows Migration To CC 72

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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GFDL 1.3 Is Out, Allows Migration To CC

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  • Bewildered (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Linker3000 ( 626634 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @07:06AM (#25624095) Journal

    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)

      by tmk ( 712144 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @07:17AM (#25624167)
      Actually these licenses are an huge improvement. BEfore GFDL arrived nearly every software product had a different licence. And not two were compatible.
      • Re:Bewildered (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jonaskoelker ( 922170 ) <jonaskoelker@yaFREEBSDhoo.com minus bsd> on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @08:34AM (#25624497)

        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.

        • by tmk ( 712144 )

          Wouldn't that be the GPL you're talking about? The GNU FDL is the license meant for doc, not src.

          You are right.

    • by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @07:41AM (#25624277) Homepage Journal

      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.

    • 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.

      • 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.

        • Whoever decided on trying to shove a round Wikipedia into a square GFDL initially made a big mistake. I'm suspecting they just didn't even read the GFDL or make any cursory effort to try to map the concepts in the GFDL, which are very obviously designed for software manuals and only for software manuals, onto what they were trying to build. Rather, probably did more of a "hmm, I need a free license for text? I hear that's what the GFDL is, let's use it". Then a few months later people started inventing rati

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by David Gerard ( 12369 )
            I understand RMS threatened to do a GNUpedia unless Nupedia adopted the GFDL. [citation needed, I don't have it to hand]
            • Wikipedia says that Nupedia started in 2000, while Gnupedia was proposed by RMS in 1999 and started in 2001. It appears RMS had the idea first and had already publicly proposed it when Nupedia started.
          • Whoever decided on trying to shove a round Wikipedia into a square GFDL initially made a big mistake. I'm suspecting they just didn't even read the GFDL or make any cursory effort to try to map the concepts in the GFDL, which are very obviously designed for software manuals and only for software manuals [my emphasis], onto what they were trying to build.

            It's arguably worse than that; I assume that you had the main part of Wikipedia (i.e. the text) in mind, but of course, WP also consists of images and it permits- if not encourages- licensing of them under the GFDL. Problem is that some important parts of it just don't seem to make sense *at all* when applied to images!

            A lot of people probably just think of the general gist of the GFDL and think "oh, GFDL, that's good", then license their work under it. I've done that myself.

            However, I've since re-read

        • by Ihmhi ( 1206036 )

          Mike Godwin, huh? I guess he usually gets the last word in on a conversation.

      • about flyers, last time I went to a GNU/Linux convention distro people were giving out flyers, and it contained a notice "this text under GFDL" etc. Just a notice, not the whole GFDL text. People use GFDL because it comes from the trusted FSF people, but they realise GFDL is not good for flyers, so what they do is just to "customise" GFDL to their needs. After all we are all a community, what a law says doesn't mean much if we trust each other and we know that no one from our community is going to sue on
      • As an example, you have Wikipedia and Wikitravel, both of which have information about various locations. You aren't allowed to copy between the two as Wikipedia uses GFDL and Wikitravel uses a cc licence.

  • by abigsmurf ( 919188 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @07:07AM (#25624107)
    Why bother with this licence at all? Why not just use creative commons? Are there any notable, useful differences or is the licence trying to spread some GNU brand recognition through association?
    • by jopsen ( 885607 )
      I'm guessing CC wasn't very known when wikipedia was founded...
    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @07:28AM (#25624223)

      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.

      • Is this because GNU wants to endorse the Create Commons license in stead of the GFDL? It seems a little strange that someone can throw a fit and get a provision in the next GFDL to re license under another license. Really kinda scares me with the suggested ..or later version.. clause that is in a lot of software. What happens when Redhat sponsors GPLv4 with the clause to migrate to the RPL (Redhat Proprietary License)?

        • Red hat only produce a fairly small percentage of GPL (or even linux) code. Wikipedia is a massively high percentage of GFDL material. Other than wikipedia there are a few wikipedia inspired wikis and a few software manuals. To get the same level of impact with the GPL you would need every linux, KDE, and Gnome coders (and then some) to demand a change. Indeed it could be argued that one of the problems this fixes is that we no longer have a situation where GFDL usage is hopelessly unbalanced in the direc
  • I'm confused (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @07:11AM (#25624129)
    It seems to say that you can now use FDL 1.3 licensed documents under CC-BY-SA 3.0, but only if it was on a wiki before 01 Nov 2008.

    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?
    • by Trepidity ( 597 ) <delirium-slashdo ... g ['ack' in gap]> on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @08:09AM (#25624397)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Teancum ( 67324 )

        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

        • When you have people saying to photographers "We promise the GFDL is only a pretend free license, people can't really use your stuff because no-one, not even the FSF, understands the GFDL" ... then they've deeply missed the point of "free content."
          • by Teancum ( 67324 )

            I don't get this attitude here, or anybody saying things like this to photographers who are trying to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

            First of all, the GFDL isn't a "pretend free license", although I do admit it has some strong detractors. More than that, however.

            Also, for photographers and graphical/multi-media content, there has always been a plethora of other licenses that you could use for contributions to Wikimedia projects, including a great many that have been permitted on the W

        • 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)

          by geniice ( 1336589 )
          While it is technically true that most of the problems of the GFDL could be fixed by improving the GFDL and creating the GSFDL the FSF has shown little inclination to do this. Remember 1)GFDL is not a free license (it contains rather a lot of invariant sections as well as deliberate ones) 2)It is unusable for images in many contexts. Postcards say. 3)even for text it is highly problematical using GFDL text with a computer program is not easy. This is not a case of CC supporters trying to knock the FSF. In
        • This is just a bunch of people who are religious zealots about the Creative Commons licensing suite who ... hate the viral nature of the Free Software Foundation license suite.

          Well this won't help those zealots, since the new GFDL only allows migrating to the ShareAlike license, which also has a "viral nature".

          Like I said, there are problems with the GFDL, but throwing it away just because a small group (and it is a very small group of individuals pushing to make this change) doesn't like the Free Software Foundation. Unfortunately this small group making this change also have some prominent positions within the WMF.

          So you think RMS would change the GFDL just because prominent people at the Wikimedia Foundation (allegely) don't like the FSF? I don't buy it.

          • by Teancum ( 67324 )

            It isn't universal within the Wikimedia Foundation politics arena, but there certainly are some hard-core zealots who support the Creative Commons suite at the exclusion of all other types of licenses, and some of those few individuals have seats on the WMF board of trustees.

            Yes, I do think RMS is being strong-armed here into making changes to the GFDL strictly because the WMF wants to get out from under the GFDL and throw it into the trash. I have been told so explicitly, and that my claims on the GFDL ar

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        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.

        I'd say you can do this to pretty much any pre-november 1st manual you want anyway. Put it under CC-BY-SA, and anyone that questions it can STFU or try a lawsuit. Since that would require you to show a "preponderance of evidence" that it was not on any "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site", you'd have to prove a negative to win. There's no requirement for anyone to keep records of any sorts, you could for example just claim you downloaded it from some other CC-BY-SA source but don't remember where.

      • What about content created on Wikipedia after 1 November? Wikipedia is still licensed under the GFDL 1.2 [wikipedia.org] for the moment.

        • According to the FAQ anyway (I haven't parsed the license text fully), the Nov 1 cutoff is only for externally originating GFDL content that was imported into Wikipedia, like the FOLDOC entries that Wikipedia imported years ago. Any material after that date that *originates* on Wikipedia can still be relicensed.

  • Why not? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sowth ( 748135 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @07:16AM (#25624157) Journal

    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.

    • FDL 1.3 also adds proxy support: "now licensors can choose a proxy who is allowed to decide whether or not a work can be licensed under the terms of future versions of the FDL." -- http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html
    • 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.

      • It may take a long explanation, but the short is: Stallman not only demands everyone cave to his specific definition of "free", but he also wants control over everything.

        The FSF often requires you to sign over copyright for them to give legal protection for a project--why? Some argue they need to so they can more easily use their lawyers, but they could just as easily set up a fund for lawyers or some other solution. They should at least give some help. How do we know these copyrighted works will be safe.

    • 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

      • by sowth ( 748135 )

        Well, my concern here was more about what could possibly be done. Let's say Stallman steps down or disappears or dies, and his successor turns out to be friendly with Company X. So the new GPL v4 comes out. And what a "coincidence", there is a clause permitting Company X to use any GPLed project in their closed source code! That code you wanted copylefted suddenly isn't quite so copyleft. ;-) I don't see any protection in place which would stop this from happening...

    • The GFDL actually gives a lot more options than CC ever will. None of those options are actually relevant to wikipedia though.

      It would also, frankly, be easier to have a copyright notice that says 'all content CC-by-SA except the book cover which belongs to $artist' than to screw around the the GFDL terms (With more legalistic wording obviously)

  • This is a brilliant move, although i would have preferred it to be for any GDFL content for a limited time rather than just wiki's. Still, it will go along way to presenting a unified front for "free" content distribution and all the advantages that holds
    • There are various bits of GFDL stuff that have invariant sections so can't really be switched to CC-BY-SA.
  • by g253 ( 855070 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @07:23AM (#25624191)
    I mean, try and explain to someone that your work is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3! That just souns silly and verbose.

    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 ;-)
    • by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @07:32AM (#25624241) Journal

      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.

      • 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

      • 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.

    • GNU Free Documentation License 1.3! That just souns silly and verbose.

      Twelve syllables.

      Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0

      Seventeen syllables. Yep, definitely less verbose.

  • My take. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by apathy maybe ( 922212 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @07:59AM (#25624343) Homepage Journal

    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:

    Copyright 2008 apathy maybe
    You are free to use and modify this work, for any purpose, in any medium with the following condition.
    This entire licence text is retained and applies to any copy and/or modification.

    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).

  • Wikipedia plans to hold a public consultation process to decide whether and how to migrate to CC-BY-SA.

    Which, if it's anything like any other wikipedia discussion, will result in one cabal fighting another, and end up with an anonymous admin (or Jimbo himself) just deciding whatever they want, regardless of truth or majority viewpoint.

  • by sleeponthemic ( 1253494 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @09:43AM (#25624933) Homepage
    The hard and heavy discussion contains not even a slipped nipple. Suggest looking elsewhere for erotica.
  • by br00tus ( 528477 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2008 @10:19AM (#25625265)
    For years we here how hard Stallman is to deal with, supposedly. How it is all about him and he is egotistical etc.

    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.

  • If I write a GFDL article on my wiki and then I post it on Wikipedia under the GFDL as well, everything is fine: I can share content between the two articles taking care to properly update the history and follow the GFDL, so I continue to benefit from modifications to the Wikipedia copy of my article.

    But if suddenly the people who run Wikipedia manage to get FSF do their thing and allow relicensing to CC-BY-SA-3.0 then I am out of luck: Wikipedians will continue making improvements to my article, but they w

    • When you think about it, GFDL means authors can't get improvements back, too...

      As the author, you can release your work under multiple licenses. For example, you can release one version under GFDL, another under CC-BY-SA, and a third under a non-transferrable license similar to the way TrollTech dual-licenses Qt.

      Any improvements anyone does to any of these versions of the work can't be reincorporated back into your own work, and you are restricted in how you can re-use it. That's a straightforward and unavo

    • by Teancum ( 67324 )

      I see no reason why FSF should accomodate a GFDL user just because they are big. If a person who has written two articles asks FSF to make a future GFDL version permitting relicensing, FSF will probably say no, but now we see a legal person that has actually not written anything but merely hosts content written by others to be able to get FSF do them a favour.

      There is a whole lot of mis-information about what is happening and why it is happening. I also don't believe Jimbo Wales when he said that he would

    • "If I write a GFDL article on my wiki and then I post it on Wikipedia under the GFDL as well, everything is fine: I can share content between the two articles taking care to properly update the history and follow the GFDL, so I continue to benefit from modifications to the Wikipedia copy of my article."

      Are you quite sure of that? So sure you'd bet a lawsuit on it?

      • "If I write a GFDL article on my wiki and then I post it on Wikipedia under the GFDL as well, everything is fine: I can share content between the two articles taking care to properly update the history and follow the GFDL, so I continue to benefit from modifications to the Wikipedia copy of my article." Are you quite sure of that? So sure you'd bet a lawsuit on it?

        I think that a cautious person should be sure about nothing, of course. Assuming that you mean that GFDL may be untested or too complex/unclear in some respects, and talking hypothetically about the worst that could ever happen, I see absolutely no reason that anyone should feel safe even if using a well-tested and clear-cut licence.

        A licence is a piece of paper, and its contents can become life-threatening only when presented in front of an impartial judge. But how could one assume that a case is every g

  • GFDL 1.3 says that this relicensing is ok only under certain conditions. One condition is that the site holding the previously GFDL-licensed content must have been a massive collaboration site (MMCS or how they call it), and they specifically say that this includes public wikis. But there is a big problem here: they say that this site is defined as being on a WWW server.

    I see no reason why a wiki or any other massive collaboration site should be on a WWW server. And exactly what is WWW? Is it TCP port 80

  • It was unfortunate the GFDL licence was created, because the GPL was good enough for most textual works and certainly good enough for Wikipedia. (And plain MIT/X was also available.) It is unfortunate the FSF created a GPL-incompatible license with the GFDL. It's also unfortunate they do not fix this incompatability ASAP, since the line between code and content can get blurry fairly quickly sometimes. Some of these issues are at:
    http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License [citizendium.org]
    And

    • Even with GPL there is a big problem with versions and support for later versions. Too many people put code online and say it's GPL, without clarifying whether it's GPLv1, 2, or 3, and whether it is with any later versions or without. :(

      It would be great if we could have a licence with an unambiguous name and no versions, so that when we see some code claiming to be under FooPL we can be more assured about it.

If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro

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