[WikiEN-l] Did I miss the great Digital Universe debate?

[Matt Brown]

On 1/9/06, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
> On 10 Jan 2006, at 01:27, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > Using the GFDLed stuff is more problematic.  Using it was, in
> > hindsight, probably the biggest mistake made by Wikipedia.  It might
> > be worth starting over from scratch just to get rid of the ties to the
> > GFDL.  Of course one can always hope that the FSF is finally going to
> > fix that license, but we've been asking for years and it hasn't
> > happened yet.
>
> Out of interest whats your problem (and fix?).

Not Anthony, but thought I'd put my oar in.  I'd rather the GFDL had
been something like the GPL, but for documents.  Easy to understand,
not very burdensome requirements.  Instead you get all the complexity
about invariant sections, about author attribution, about prohibiting
DRM, about all kinds of things.

Part of the problem was that the FSF seem to have been only thinking
of conventional books when they invented the GFDL.  Many of its
requirements (e.g. having to include the whole license with any
re-use, rather than simply a pointer to it) make sense with a book but
not if you want to re-use just a tiny portion of the work.

Bear in mind that Wikipedia is in actuality rather far from complete
compliance with the GFDL ourselves, even though we officially 'turn
off' parts of the GFDL for Wikipedia.  I'm not the person to go to
about this, but others on this list have studied this in more depth.

The Creative Commons people got a lot more right, although people have
issues with parts of it, e.g. no requirement for the original source
to be available.

-Matt