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:
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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
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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=1…
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