What problems are you seeing with the GFDL that the
"Creative Commons"
license (which I'm not familiar with) would solve?
The main problem I see with the GNU FDL as it stands is that it demands that any work that uses any of its content must be released under the same GNU FDL license. However there are other open content licences out there that people will be using. So, if some day down the road anyone wants to mix content from a Creative Commons license or any other license at all, the work must be released under the GNU license. So any work I do on a textbook will be limited to only GNU versions.
It would be as if the work wereforever condemned to be in its own, propietary format, 100% incompatable with all other sources and licenses, including all other open content licenses that I am familiar with.
This will be very inconvenient to Sanford Forte of the California Open Source Textbook Project and may make any work we do for his project unusable unless he and all his people are willing to release everything under the GNU FDL license.
It is also very inconvenient for me because any work that I do under the GNU FDL on the wiki is only mine to use under another license as long as noone else makes any modification at all to it that I keep. So if I wanted to release my own work under another, more flexible license, I would have to go thru the work of eliminating every letter that wasnt my own. This is hardly the spirit underlying open content.
Remember that the GNU FDL was created for software, not open content. And remember that even RMS says that it may not be the ideal license for open content.
One solution I see would be to create a special version of the GNU FDL just for open content, or just for Wikipedia. That way we could decide for ourselves without needing the rest of the GNU world to go along with it. Or, adapting another license like one of the Creative Commons ones. Thats the only way I see that will prevent eternal, unmixable forks of content.
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