On 1/9/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/9/06, Justin Cormack justin@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.
Actually I don't see any reason why using the GPL unmodified wouldn't have been a much better solution than using the GFDL. Sure, the GPL was designed for software, but the GFDL was designed for software documentation. The GPL defines "Program" as "any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License" and "source code" as "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", so it *can* be applied to Wikipedia AFAICT.
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.
I believe the GPL imposes this requirement too, though. The best solution (again, in hindsight) would have been a custom license.
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
I doubt the GFDL accomplishes much wrt making the original source available either, though (at least in terms of Wikipedia). The GFDL lists HTML as an example of a "transparent file format", which probably means there is no requirement to distribute the original wikitext.
Anthony