2008/10/18 geni geniice@gmail.com:
The FSF tend to be ideologically driven but at least predictably so. CC tend to be more pragmatic which makes them less predicable. We have no reason to think that CC would opt for strong copyleft for images unless they have made a clear direct commitment to do so. They have not.
This argument implies that the GFDL is any more a strong copyleft license than CC-BY-SA is. I see no reason to assume that is the case.
Yes, we need to work towards a good solution for strong copyleft on embedded media. CC appears to me to be more logically positioned to help us solve this problem, because it fits much more neatly in their mission focus (helping creators of media of all types) than in the FSF's (supporting free software), and because their license release cycles tend to be significantly shorter than the FSF's.
Of course you can argue that the CC approach in _general_ has a bias against freedom and a bias in favor of restrictions. I think that's a completely legitimate argument, and I would love to see CC become more proactive in supporting freedom. Their explicit designation of CC-BY and CC-BY-SA as Free Cultural Works licenses (with a link to the definition) is an important step in that direction, and I do know from my personal interactions with CC that there are people in the organization that would like CC to be more actively promoting the free licenses over the non-free ones.
Becoming more closely involved with CC is a great way for us to become an important voice for freedom. For example, I think we can successfully promote a view that non-free licenses are inappropriate for collaborative communities.
But irrespective of that, CC has no incentive _not_ to help us solve the strong copyleft problem: even when viewed as a purely pragmatic organization, it fits completely within their mission scope to solve problems like this one. Whether that solution should consist of modifying CC-BY-SA itself is, in my opinion, legitimately debatable, though as I said, it seems to be the simplest solution and reduces license proliferation, which CC is explicitly opposed to at this point.
What I do not agree with is the notion that GFDL somehow represents an actual solution to the problem. That understates the massive problems associated with reuse of GFDL licensed electronic documents and compatibility with CC-BY-SA resources, it quietly ignores the inherent contradiction in a strong copyleft interpretation of the GFDL, and it overstates the significance of weakly varying interpretations of essentially equivalent legal texts.