On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Michael
Snow<wikipedia(a)verizon.net> wrote:
[snip]
I cannot fathom why you would limit media to
being released only under
the GFDL unless it was designed specifically for incorporation into a
GFDL work. It's a documentation license, not a media license, and when
applied to radically different contexts it will still be free in the
dogmatic sense, but it may no longer be all that useful.
Because, unfortunately, representatives of Creative Commons have
asserted that CC-By-Sa licensed media can integrated as a whole
integrated into non-free works, producing a result which is not freely
licensed. In other words— that the cc-by-sa copyleft is nearly moot in
the context of images since they tend to be either incorporated
verbatim or subject to only trivial non-copyright deserving
modifications even when the the resulting work as a whole clearly
builds upon the illustration and isn't merely a collection of separate
things.
The license text itself appears to be reasonably explicit on this
matter— but I feel it would be unethical to use CC-By-SA when doing
so would cause me to end up litigating against people who were merely
following, in good faith, what they believe to be authoritative
advice.
I don't think I'd be so quick to blame Creative Commons for this,
regardless of the advice they've given. It seems like most people
reusing copyleft materials in good faith do so without fully
understanding the concept, advice or no advice. I've seen plenty of GFDL
material combined with other works in this way as well, even when as you
say, the whole clearly builds upon the original rather than being a
collection of works that can stand independently. It's a bad practice
and a major educational challenge for free licenses, but I don't find it
that closely related to the issue of choosing a free license in the
first place.
--Michael Snow