Wikipedia Moving From GFDL To Creative Commons License

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."

For those playing at home

Like the GNU Free Documentation License, the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license is a free, copyleft license designed for works other than computer programs. It just lacks some of the practical problems that come with the GNU FDL, which was designed specifically for software manuals that run dozens of pages long. Individual encyclopedia articles are much shorter than that, and the ability to incorporate the license by reference is a better match for Wikimedia Foundation's uses. But the Creative Commons licenses have some of their own practical problems, such as requiring distributors to remove an upstream author's credit upon request.

Re:For those playing at home

GNU FDL was chosen as CC was not available at the time. Now CC has additionally become an accepted standard with a lot of material out there. It is great news as this makes it easier to mix content from and to their projects.

Re:

Hear hear. Now that this decision has been made, how long until the full transition occurs? It certainly looks like a much better choice. From the *wikipedia page on the Creative Commons licenses:

"Some within the copyleft movement argue that only the Attribution-ShareAlike license is actually a true copyleft license [24] and that there is no standard of freedom between Creative Commons licenses (as there is, for example, within the free software and open source movements). [25] An effort within the movement

Re:For those playing at home

GNU FDL was chosen as CC was not available at the time. Now CC has additionally become an accepted standard with a lot of material out there. It is great news as this makes it easier to mix content from and to their projects.

While that may have been Jimbo Wales motivation for the GNU FDL, the real truth goes a bit deeper than even that. This is far too simple of an explaination.

There was another encyclopedia effort called the GNU-pedia being led by none other than Richard Stallman who tried to start an open-source collaboratively written encyclopedia. This was started about the same time that Nupedia was just getting off the ground as well. Nupedia had a slight head-start in terms of getting going a little bit earlier, although the licensing terms for Nupedia were not nailed down as the whole concept of an open-source encyclopedia was still getting established.

Due to the bureaucratic overhead in Nupedia, a much more free-form wiki-style encyclopedia was created by many of the participants in this early encyclopedia effort, and that became what we know today as Wikipedia. Again, with the already established crowd with ties to GNU projects and committed to the general philosophy of the GPL, the GNU FDL was a natural choice... where that document license was just being released. Having Richard Stallman brow beat Jimmy Wales certainly didn't hurt either, although I don't think it was that hard of a decision to be made at the time.

BTW, there were other "open source" type licenses at the time besides the GFDL, even if what we know today as the "Creative Commons" suite of licenses didn't really exist in its current form.

All that has really happened here is the "or later version" clause of the GFDL has been allowed to include a somewhat similar philosophical Creative Commons license as something considered a later version or edition of this particular license. What the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees has done is to make a political move to explicitly move the content of the Wikimedia projects (not just Wikipedia) to the Creative Commons license explicitly mentioned in that new clause.

That the WMF board also helped to write that clause of the GFDL due to placing political pressure on Richard Stallman and those involved in the Free Software Foundation sort of brings this thing full circle as well. A lot more is happening here besides "the folks at Wikipedia seeing the light" and suddenly deciding to switch licenses.

BTW, I do think harmonization of the various free document licenses is on the whole a good thing, and having the weight of the Wikipedia editors and enthusiasts championing a broader license in terms of something used in more documents can only make that resulting license a much more stable license and less likely to be modified to something generally unacceptable to that community.

Still, to suggest that the GFDL was chosen only because the CC-BY-SA license was not yet written is a gross oversimplification of what really happened and doesn't tell the true story. Those who put reliance on the GPL, however, beware. That license could have the same thing happen in the future, based on whatever whim or political winds happen that can influence the Free Software Foundation.

The one thing that I do regret never happened is some sort of harmonization between the GPL and GFDL.... primarily in regards to open source textbooks and commentaries on software design. It at least had a shot with the licensing staying within the scope of the Free Software Foundation, but now that the Creative Commons governing body is in charge, it seems like something that will never happen. This is still a problem with the CC-BY-SA license and won't get resolved any time in the near future.

Re:For those playing at home

Wikipedia has a useful FAQ [wikimedia.org] about the relicensing.

The parent post makes some good points about what was undesirable about the GFDL. In addition, there's the issue of needless proliferation of licenses. What everybody originally intended here was to make a commons that everyone could draw from. If A makes an animation, and B writes a song, and C performs B's song, and A, B, and C all try their best to put their work in the commons, then D should be able to come along and make a video consisting of A's animation with a sound track consisting of C's performance of B's song. There shouldn't be artificial obstacles just because A, B, and C chose different licenses.

I'm not saying there should only be one free-as-in-speech license for written materials. We do need at least two, because there are real philosophical differences between BSD-style licenses and GPL-style licenses. But there is not a real philosophical difference between the GFDL and CC-BY-SA.

Re:

I'm not saying there should only be one free-as-in-speech license for written materials. We do need at least two, because there are real philosophical differences between BSD-style licenses and GPL-style licenses.

CC-BY and CC-BY-SA appear to nicely fit the roles you mention. But the credit removal requirement in even CC-BY might cause license incompatibility if a free program under a GNU license uses CC-BY images, audio, etc. Or am I misreading the definition of "aggregate" in the GPL?

Re:For those playing at home

Was it the license that was preventing a downloadable dump of Wikipedia from being distributed on an iPhone?

No, it's the size. A text dump of the current version of the English Wikipedia (no images, no history) is 45 GB.

Re:For those playing at home

Or 4.7 gigs compressed, if you only download the articles.

Re:For those playing at home

I only read Wikipedia for the articles.

Re:For those playing at home

I assume this includes all the talk pages, user profile pages, votes for deletion pages, nerd rage about pictures of a human turd and pages outlining wikipedia policies right?

This is a fair question, actually, even if it is posed in a rough AC manner.

The short answer is yes, it includes all of these other pages as well, including stuff subject to deletion and spam put on Wikipedia by vandals.

That doesn't make goatse.cx now available under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license, but it does make this page [wikipedia.org] available under those terms, and any side commentaries on the topic as well, even if it is otherwise off-topic on other pages of Wikipedia.

Might I be the first to say...

...is this the start of the end of the GFDL?

Re:

Not really, the GFDL is for things that are much longer, and y'know Wikipedia articles really aren't supposed to be very long (the one on the "United States" is about as big as they get).

Basically, imagine the GFDL tacked onto a five-sentence stub Wikpedia article about a town in France. Then imagine the GFDL tacked onto a hundred-page software manual. It's (proportionally speaking) a pretty big difference, which makes it very practical in the latter case but not in the former.

Re:

Everything you said is correct except you gave no real reason why the GFDL should continue to exist. You're free to include the full CC license too if you feel like, and if you only did it by reference I doubt many would care. The CCs have pretty much become the standard for any type of free non-code material, and I can't see any good reason why software documentation should need a special license different from any other text.

Okay

I just got off the phone with the big guy, you know, RMS himself. St. Ignacio or whatever.

And he's fucking pissed.

He said and I quote, "Looks like these fuckers don't know who they're dealing with. They need to be taught a lesson... freedom ain't free."

Apparently, he's planning on liberating wikipedia by force.

Re:Okay

RMS actually thinks it's a good idea [fsf.org] :-)

Re:

What does Richard Marx have to do with all of this?

He's the number one selling soul singer songwriter of the 80's!

Re:I didn't RTFA

Wikipedia is very different from a file upload site like Flickr, in that each page is not the work of one individual, but the combined work of many. Consistent licensing is essential - noone wants to have to check all the licenses of previous edits before they add their own to ensure that no license conflict happens.

Re:

Good point. The original license does not account for the fluid nature of articles at wikipedia. From a legal perspective this seems like an improvement (IANAL though).

Re:I didn't RTFA

Is existing GFDL content compatible with the CC licence?

I think (please correct me) what they did was write a GFDL version compatible with the CC. Then they upgraded the licence of the existing content and thus now they can switch over to CC.

I'd read the article, but it's slashdotted :-[

Why can't individual contributors choose their licence like they can with Flickr?

Wikipedia is not a blog. It would become a format like urbandictionary.com or everything2.com: no rewriting and collaborating on content, rather single statements of various truthiness.

Re:I didn't RTFA

Is existing GFDL content compatible with the CC licence?

I think (please correct me) what they did was write a GFDL version compatible with the CC. Then they upgraded the licence of the existing content and thus now they can switch over to CC.

Close: Wikipedia was licensed under the GFDL version 1.2 or later. What the FSF did was write version 1.3 with a clause saying that any GFDL-licensed wiki (with safeguards to prevent license-washing) could be re-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0.

Re:

Well, the migration couldn't have happened if the FSF didn't sign off on the change; they were the only ones with the authority to make an update to the GFDL allowing it. Although it seems that the FSF's decision came out of a negotiation [slashdot.org] that took place back in 2007, so perhaps it wasn't really their idea and it was more a matter of bowing to pressure from the masses. Also, I have no idea how RMS personally felt about it.

I definitely agree that the GFDL was totally unsuitable for Wikipedia.

Re:Wikipedia does something right for a change

It is slightly chilling for anyone using another FSF license. You can omit the 'or later versions' license and have the possibility that the later versions of other FSF licenses will be incompatible with your version (e.g. LGPLv3 is incompatible with GPLv2; good luck if you were working on a GPLv2-only project that depended on a library that has moved from LGPLv2-or-later to LGPLv3-or-later). Or you can include it and have the possibility that the FSF will decide to grant an exemption for a specific large organisation and allow them to relicense your work.

Re:

RMS's opinion on the change [fsf.org].

Re:Freedom Nerds

It seems to me that the freedom nerds have ended up creating incompatible freedom licenses and have thus shackled themselves in such a way as to prevent them from sucking each other off.

That's a fairly accurate interpretation, yes. However, the point is that the CC licenses allow for mutual fellatio among a greater and more inclusive cross-section of nerds, while also involving less legal restrictions.

Some of us tend to view this as an extremely positive and beneficial thing, because after all, when we're talking about mutual oral sex between nerds, what's not to love?

Re:Tech news?

How did this minor piece of lawyering end up on a tech news site?

You mean as compared to the usual game reviews and Apple rumors?