The Wikimedia projects should switch from the GFDL to the CC-BY-SA license.
Why to switch =============
When we started, the CC-BY-SA didn't exist and GFDL was the only available license that expressed the "free-to-use-and-modify-but- creators-need-to-be-attributed-and-the-license-cannot-be-changed" idea for textual materials. Since then, we have largely ignored the more arcane features of the GFDL, essentially telling our users "If
you keep the license and provide a link back to the original, you're welcome to use our materials." In other words, we have always used GFDL
as if it were CC-BY-SA. This practice is unfair for two reasons:
* People who want to use our content have to trust that we won't enforce the more arcane features of the GFDL in the future, such as the
requirement to change the article's title or to explicitly list at least five principal authors.
* Contributors to Wikimedia projects have to trust that no one will
exploit the GFDL in the future and encumber their materials with non-changeable text ("invariant sections").
By contrast, the CC-BY-SA license has the following advantages:
* It is simple and fits our precise requirements.
* It is promoted, maintained and translated by an active organization, Creative Commons.
* It is better known and more widely used than the GFDL, at least outside of Wikimedia projects, increasing the potential for re-use and collaboration.
We should do the right thing, bring theory and practice into alignment, and switch to the CC-BY-SA license once and for all.
How to switch =============
Here's the plan: we issue a press release and post a prominent website banner, saying that from some specified date on, the current and all future versions of all materials on Wikimedia servers will be considered released under CC-BY-SA. Any content creator who does not agree with this change is invited to have their materials removed before that date.
I don't see how any good-faith contributor who has researched the licenses could disagree with this change and prefer GFDL over CC-BY-SA.
A small group of disgruntled former contributors will probably use the occasion to get their material wiped from our servers, and I don't see anything wrong with that. Some trolls will attempt to game the system, but we can deal with that.
All materials in the history up to the specified deadline should probably remain available under GFDL only; this makes it easier to deal with the material of contributors who disagree with the change. And we need to find some way to deal with discussion and policy pages.
I realize that this opt-out procedure is not perfectly clean from a legalistic standpoint, but neither is our current distortion of the GFDL. If we look at it pragmatically, considering what YouTube and the Internet Archive can get away with, there doesn't seem to be any appreciable danger that we could be successfully sued over this matter;
the number of true copyright violations that appear on Wikipedia every day are a much bigger cause for concern. And ethically speaking, there's nothing wrong with the opt-out approach since the two licenses are, in essence and intent, identical.
--Axel
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