Hi,

In march, George Siemens, me and a few people of the blogging community, started open-education.org, an open content in education advocacy initiative. So I'm very excited to see that Wikipedia starts a project in the same direction.

The interaction between GFDL and Creative Commons share-Alike is bugging me too. In an interview with open-education.org, we asked Lessig about it:

---- Open Education: How the Creative Commons Share-Alike license relate to the GNU Free Documentation License? The FDL has been used for large projects like wikipedia, planetmath.org. Is it possible for Share-Alike content to be used in a similar FDL licensed project?

Lessig: The Free Documentation License is similar in some ways, and we think it’s a good license for functional works. We’ve been developing licenses that are more directly focused on regular literary works and other creative work, not directly functional. We have license options which have similar copyleft functionality in them, but I think the key is to multiply the number of licenses out there that enable machine-readable expressions of freedom. The one thing the FDL has failed to do, as has the GPL, is to enable a semantic web-like architecture that encourages machine-readable expressions of freedoms. That’s the core commitment of the Creative Commons. http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/lessig.htm -----

I also would like to point out the recent Debian decision to consider the GFDL as a non-free license. This has been debated for months on debian-legal. You can read the archives here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/

A summary of the Debian criticism on the FDL: "Why You Shouldn't Use the GNU FDL" http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html

The compatibility issues arise with all strong copyleft licenses like the Design Science License, Open Publication License, Share-Alike, ... For a longer list of free and semi-free license, see my webpage at http://www.opencursus.be/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=11...

Also Wikipedia is not the only GFDL-using open content project, albeit the largest, compatibility with other projects is also something to keep in mind.

As a sidenote, I think the FDL is a better license for a textbook project, then for encyclopedia items. The FDL explicitly mentions software documentation and textbooks as it main use.

I believe the FDL is not as perfect for textbooks/documentation/reference works as the GPL is for software. Creating the ideal open content license is a long term work. Recently David Whiley closed down Opencontent.org and joined the Creative Commons initiative to work on educational (but semi-free) licenses.

I think it would be a confusing thing to create a licensing difference between the Wikipedia Encyclopedia and the Wikimedia Textbook Project now. The discussion between FSF and Creative Commons and some other license authors can, and probably will, be time consuming. I don't think the Textbook Project needs to wait for a solution in order to advance.

And if there is a solution eventually, it might probably as well affect the Encyclopedia too, not just the Textbook project. So I think this could be best handled at the the Wikimedia Foundation level, instead of at the level of one of its subprojects.

Wouter Vanden Hove http://www.opencursus.be [Flemish Open Course portal] http://www.open-education.org [Open Content in Education Advocacy]

Op di 15-07-2003, om 22:58 schreef Karl Wick:

How can we in a practical way go about changing the current open source licenses so that they allow interoperability (especially between GNU FDL and some of the Creative Commons ones) ? Who do we talk to or where do we go to make this happen ?

Jimmy, you seem to be already in touch with appropriate persons. Have you discussed this with Larry Lessig of the Creative Commons ? .. who could we talk to on the GNU side ? RMS ? Might he be open to this idea ? I'd like to see this happen !

-Karl