Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
Dariusz Siedlecki a écrit :
Still, note this - do we really want to attach 10 pages of GFDL license to our print edition? I think a simple "Licensed under CC-By-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/etc/etc)" would be okay - and this is exactly what a text licensed under CC needs.
Sure, but the CC licenses are not that clear ! Do you now what they mean when they say they are not "revokable" for example. We just talked about it for 2 hours on IRC yesterday.
The CC licenses were not meant to be used precisely for Wikinews and they don't adopt the exact vocabulary we need to describe what we do. We have a chance to make it perfect, so let's do it rather than to rely on third parties legal work.
The one huge problem about rolling your own license is that you can also introduce errors into the license that are unintended, or even cause unintended problems that might cause heartburn in the future. The advertisement clause in the BSD license is a good example, which is viral and can grow incredibly long if done properly. The fact that the GFDL is incompatable with the GPL (you can't use non trivial GFDL'd software examples in a GPL'd computer program, for example) is one that is really weird, particularly considering the two different licenses are written by the same organization.
The usual Free Software Foundation "loophole" on this issue is the "use this version of the license or later adopted version". This is more of a cop-out, and something that can cause further legal messes. It does, however, allow the chance that some time in the future a custom license could be merged with the GFDL in a much better licensing arrangement, provided the GFDL "upgrade" fixes some of the issues that most Wikinews users are complaining about with that license. Or fix the problems that may come up when the draft license is issued, from those kinds of things listed above.
Using a "standard" license means that the defense of using it will have been vetted in legal circles, something that the GPL is currently going through with the infamous SCO Linux case. Defending the license also gets popular and legal suport (sometimes) from the people who wrote the license. If we go it alone and write our own license, we don't get that sort of protection and instead put the authors and (if approved by the board) the Foundation board to stand alone with the license. On the other hand, if it is well written and very clear as well as reasonable, it may get adopted by other groups besides Wikinews.