I'm finishing a "licenses on Wikipedia" speech I'm going to have tomorrow. I want to check something in the GFDL text. I get 404… and after a while, refresh shows "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3, 3 November 2008"… :-)
Going to check the changes… and possibly rewrite some parts of my presentation :-/
-- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]
2008/11/3 Petr Kadlec petr.kadlec@gmail.com:
I'm finishing a "licenses on Wikipedia" speech I'm going to have tomorrow. I want to check something in the GFDL text. I get 404… and after a while, refresh shows "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3, 3 November 2008"… :-)
Going to check the changes… and possibly rewrite some parts of my presentation :-/
What URL is that for? The license statements on the English Wikipedia all say v1.2 as far as I can see (I just checked).
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2008/11/3 Petr Kadlec petr.kadlec@gmail.com:
I'm finishing a "licenses on Wikipedia" speech I'm going to have tomorrow. I want to check something in the GFDL text. I get 404… and after a while, refresh shows "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3, 3 November 2008"… :-)
Going to check the changes… and possibly rewrite some parts of my presentation :-/
What URL is that for? The license statements on the English Wikipedia all say v1.2 as far as I can see (I just checked).
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
In the FAQ there is a short explanation of the changes: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html Bence Damokos
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 5:03 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2008/11/3 Petr Kadlec petr.kadlec@gmail.com:
I'm finishing a "licenses on Wikipedia" speech I'm going to have tomorrow. I want to check something in the GFDL text. I get 404… and after a while, refresh shows "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3, 3 November 2008"… :-)
Going to check the changes… and possibly rewrite some parts of my presentation :-/
What URL is that for? The license statements on the English Wikipedia all say v1.2 as far as I can see (I just checked).
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
-- geni
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On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 5:09 PM, Bence Damokos bdamokos@gmail.com wrote:
In the FAQ there is a short explanation of the changes: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html
*
The work must have been added to a public wiki (or some other kind of web site where the general public could review and edit the materials) before November 1, 2008.
All FDL-covered material added to Wikipedia before November 1, 2008 satisfies these conditions.$
-- What...extraordinary timing. Only 3 days worth of work lost...
Michael
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:16 AM, Michael Bimmler mbimmler@gmail.com wrote:
The work must have been added to a public wiki (or some otherkind of web site where the general public could review and edit the materials) before November 1, 2008.
All FDL-covered material added to Wikipedia before November 1, 2008 satisfies these conditions.$
-- What...extraordinary timing. Only 3 days worth of work lost...
Nope, no work lost. Look at the passage again:
"An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008."
The only work that couldn't be relicensed is work that was GFDL but not on the wiki prior to November 1st. Work that is on the wiki is able to be transferred at any time prior to August 2009.
1) Work that is created or edited on the wiki at any time can be transferred 2) Work that was released under the GFDL, but wasn't on an MMC prior to November 1st 2008 cannot be transferred. 3) Work that was released under the GFDL, and was on an MMC prior to November 1st can be transferred
So the only work that we can't transfer to CC-BY-SA is GFDL work from elsewhere on the internet that is being moved to a wiki. We don't lose any work that our volunteers are creating on the wiki, we only lose the ability to reuse GFDL'd content from other non-MMC websites that isn't already duplicated on the wiki.
--Andrew Whitworth
2008/11/3 Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.com:
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 11:16 AM, Michael Bimmler mbimmler@gmail.com wrote:
The work must have been added to a public wiki (or some otherkind of web site where the general public could review and edit the materials) before November 1, 2008.
All FDL-covered material added to Wikipedia before November 1, 2008 satisfies these conditions.$
-- What...extraordinary timing. Only 3 days worth of work lost...
Nope, no work lost. Look at the passage again:
You're a little late, we resolved that confusion several hours ago (it was caused by an incorrect FAQ which has now been corrected).
2008/11/3 Bence Damokos bdamokos@gmail.com:
In the FAQ there is a short explanation of the changes: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html
This FAQ has now been updated to correct the error regarding the date clause.
Cheers.
Well, that's a completely useless license. Congratulations to the WMF for wasting a whole load of time. How are we meant to use it when the deadline was 2 days ago? Anything added to our projects since then would need to be deleted in order to transfer to CC, which includes any content added during the discussion about whether we want to switch which will take some time.
Referring to:
"An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008."
I get the feeling that your reading of this section is not completely accurate. "First published somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated..." What specific types of content do you suppose that applies to?
Nathan
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
Cheers.
Well, that's a completely useless license. Congratulations to the WMF for wasting a whole load of time. How are we meant to use it when the deadline was 2 days ago? Anything added to our projects since then would need to be deleted in order to transfer to CC, which includes any content added during the discussion about whether we want to switch which will take some time.
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On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Referring to:
"An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008."
I get the feeling that your reading of this section is not completely accurate. "First published somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated..." What specific types of content do you suppose that applies to?
IANAL, but this would mean text added after a permission to use has been received (e.g. in OTRS). I am ambivalent whether this deadline means that OTRS should stop accepting text, as that would be incorporated after the deadline and thus its licence unconvertible.
Bence Damokos
Nathan
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com
wrote:
Cheers.
Well, that's a completely useless license. Congratulations to the WMF for wasting a whole load of time. How are we meant to use it when the deadline was 2 days ago? Anything added to our projects since then would need to be deleted in order to transfer to CC, which includes any content added during the discussion about whether we want to switch which will take some time.
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I see that the FAQ has a different take on the matter than is suggested by its actual text, or at least the actual license text is more clear than the FAQ. The FAQ suggests having a passed deadline is designed to prevent the wholesale addition of text released under FDL in order to relicense it CC-BY-SA. That would work fine with the text as its written, and would seem only to require the deletion of FDL content originally published elsewhere that is added to Wikipedia after Nov 1. I think the volume of "published elsewhere" content added to Wikipedia is relatively small these days, isn't it?
Nathan
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Referring to:
"An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008."
I get the feeling that your reading of this section is not completely accurate. "First published somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated..." What specific types of content do you suppose that applies to?
Nathan
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
Cheers.
Well, that's a completely useless license. Congratulations to the WMF for wasting a whole load of time. How are we meant to use it when the deadline was 2 days ago? Anything added to our projects since then would need to be deleted in order to transfer to CC, which includes any content added during the discussion about whether we want to switch which will take some time.
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2008/11/3 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
Referring to:
"An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008."
I get the feeling that your reading of this section is not completely accurate.
That's correct. Changes originating in the wiki to be relicensed can still be relicensed past November 1, in fact until the 2009 deadline for relicensing. I haven't checked the FAQ (we didn't receive an advance copy of it), but it is possible that it doesn't correctly reflect this point.
More later, Erik
2008/11/3 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
2008/11/3 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
Referring to:
"An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008."
I get the feeling that your reading of this section is not completely accurate.
That's correct. Changes originating in the wiki to be relicensed can still be relicensed past November 1, in fact until the 2009 deadline for relicensing. I haven't checked the FAQ (we didn't receive an advance copy of it), but it is possible that it doesn't correctly reflect this point.
Ok, that's marginally better. We don't need to delete everything posted in the past 2 days (and the subsequent time until we decide whether or not to switch) we just have to scour through it all and delete those parts that weren't originally posted to whatever project you're on - that includes anything transwikied and anything translated. I stand by my original assessment, it's a useless license.
And it seems the FAQ is very badly written, do you have a contact there that you can inform?
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 5:31 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2008/11/3 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
2008/11/3 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
Referring to:
"An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008."
I get the feeling that your reading of this section is not completely accurate.
That's correct. Changes originating in the wiki to be relicensed can still be relicensed past November 1, in fact until the 2009 deadline for relicensing. I haven't checked the FAQ (we didn't receive an advance copy of it), but it is possible that it doesn't correctly reflect this point.
Ok, that's marginally better. We don't need to delete everything posted in the past 2 days (and the subsequent time until we decide whether or not to switch) we just have to scour through it all and delete those parts that weren't originally posted to whatever project you're on - that includes anything transwikied and anything translated. I stand by my original assessment, it's a useless license.
I'm following up on what Bence mentioned first here: What about e.g. images that we receive through permissions@wikimedia.org between November 1 and (hopefully) Novermber X? These were obviously published first somewhere else than a Wiki...what's the position on this? I'm not intending to spread panic (*especially* because I'm really not a copyright law expert and at the moment somewhat too tired for analytical reading of the license), but still, if the permissions team should stop handle permissions for the moment, it had better be told...
Best regards, Michael
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Ok, that's marginally better. We don't need to delete everything posted in the past 2 days (and the subsequent time until we decide whether or not to switch) we just have to scour through it all and delete those parts that weren't originally posted to whatever project you're on - that includes anything transwikied and anything translated.
Why does translation and transwikiing prove a problem? It seems entirely reasonable to treat the entire complex of Wikimedia GFDL wikis as a single "group" for the purpose of this license - we already do this with GFDL 1.2, as people happily say things like "see the edit history on fr.wp for original authors"
2008/11/3 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Ok, that's marginally better. We don't need to delete everything posted in the past 2 days (and the subsequent time until we decide whether or not to switch) we just have to scour through it all and delete those parts that weren't originally posted to whatever project you're on - that includes anything transwikied and anything translated.
Why does translation and transwikiing prove a problem? It seems entirely reasonable to treat the entire complex of Wikimedia GFDL wikis as a single "group" for the purpose of this license - we already do this with GFDL 1.2, as people happily say things like "see the edit history on fr.wp for original authors"
Reusers of our content regularly say "See the article history on Wikipedia for the original authors" we don't consider every use and reuse of Wikimedia content to be part of one big project. There is an argument that each project can be considered one work, rather than each article being a separate work, but I've never heard it argued that the whole of Wikimedia is one work.
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Ok, that's marginally better. We don't need to delete everything posted in the past 2 days (and the subsequent time until we decide whether or not to switch) we just have to scour through it all and delete those parts that weren't originally posted to whatever project you're on - that includes anything transwikied and anything translated.
No. Please re-read the "eligible for licensing" section and the definition of an "MMC Site". Wikipedia.org can clearly be considered a single "MMC Site". This doesn't require interpreting all of Wikipedia as a single work. Notice that even the definition of MMC uses the word "works".
And it seems the FAQ is very badly written, do you have a contact there that you can inform?
Yes.
2008/11/3 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Ok, that's marginally better. We don't need to delete everything posted in the past 2 days (and the subsequent time until we decide whether or not to switch) we just have to scour through it all and delete those parts that weren't originally posted to whatever project you're on - that includes anything transwikied and anything translated.
No. Please re-read the "eligible for licensing" section and the definition of an "MMC Site". Wikipedia.org can clearly be considered a single "MMC Site". This doesn't require interpreting all of Wikipedia as a single work. Notice that even the definition of MMC uses the word "works".
Ok, so the extent of the problem is reducing, but there are still going to be things added between the deadline and whenever we decide to switch (assuming we do switch, that isn't definite). It's nothing short of absurd to have the deadline two days before the license was released. I told you it was important to run a draft by the community before releasing the final copy, this is exactly what I was talking about.
The reasoning given in the FAQ for adopting a passed deadline makes sense, and while some may disagree that it was necessary it certainly isn't "absurd." Let's wait a little while longer before declaring the terms of the license to be a disaster, especially since "first to the mark" with criticism doesn't correlate with expertise.
Nathan
On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:54 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2008/11/3 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Ok, that's marginally better. We don't need to delete everything posted in the past 2 days (and the subsequent time until we decide whether or not to switch) we just have to scour through it all and delete those parts that weren't originally posted to whatever project you're on - that includes anything transwikied and anything translated.
No. Please re-read the "eligible for licensing" section and the definition of an "MMC Site". Wikipedia.org can clearly be considered a single "MMC Site". This doesn't require interpreting all of Wikipedia as a single work. Notice that even the definition of MMC uses the word "works".
Ok, so the extent of the problem is reducing, but there are still going to be things added between the deadline and whenever we decide to switch (assuming we do switch, that isn't definite). It's nothing short of absurd to have the deadline two days before the license was released. I told you it was important to run a draft by the community before releasing the final copy, this is exactly what I was talking about.
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2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
It's nothing short of absurd to have the deadline two days before the license was released.
Not at all. It's a deliberate design decision to make it impossible to bulk-import and relicense other people's FDL works, e.g. FDL-licensed software manuals, while not affecting legitimate transactions that have happened prior to the relicensing window of opportunity.
2008/11/3 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
It's nothing short of absurd to have the deadline two days before the license was released.
Not at all. It's a deliberate design decision to make it impossible to bulk-import and relicense other people's FDL works, e.g. FDL-licensed software manuals, while not affecting legitimate transactions that have happened prior to the relicensing window of opportunity.
That argument works if the deadline were today, it doesn't justify having it 2 days ago. If the deadline was today and this had been announced properly telling everyone to stop including content from elsewhere in our projects, we wouldn't have a problem. As it is, we have 2 days in which there was no way we could have done anything, and the only announcement we got from someone that happened to see the new version and post here and then it was up to us to realise the consequences.
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
That argument works if the deadline were today, it doesn't justify having it 2 days ago.
To avoid confusion about timezones, it's better to date it clearly in the past. I don't see that it has significant impact.
As it is, we have 2 days in which there was no way we could have done anything,
It's not clear to me that anything needs to be done. Even the relicensing of transwiki copy operations within Wikimedia is IMO clearly in the spirit of the license. There will probably be a small set of copy operations affected by this, e.g. copying material from Wikia into a Wikimedia wikis, but we will have to deal with that regardless of the deadline.
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
the only announcement we got from someone that happened to see the new version and post here and then it was up to us to realise the consequences.
Implying that we wouldn't have been told seems a little unfair - Petr said himself that he stumbled across it at the exact moment it went live. I'm sure there was a notification in the works, it just got pre-empted...
2008/11/3 Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com:
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
the only announcement we got from someone that happened to see the new version and post here and then it was up to us to realise the consequences.
Implying that we wouldn't have been told seems a little unfair - Petr said himself that he stumbled across it at the exact moment it went live. I'm sure there was a notification in the works, it just got pre-empted...
I'm sure we would have been told, but since the deadline had already past we needed to be told as soon as possible. In fact, ideally we would have been told 2 days ago to stop including content from elsewhere.
2008/11/3 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Ok, so the extent of the problem is reducing, but there are still going to be things added between the deadline and whenever we decide to switch (assuming we do switch, that isn't definite). It's nothing short of absurd to have the deadline two days before the license was released. I told you it was important to run a draft by the community before releasing the final copy, this is exactly what I was talking about.
It's a problem we can deal with in much the same way as any copyvio issue. This days we are bringing in very little off wiki text so it is unlikely to present a significant issue.
Images are more of a problem both in terms of the question of if we have prominent tools to edit them and the issue that we will need to kill off the GFDL 1.2 exclusive images (although we always knew that would happen).
CC Compatible Licenses:http://creativecommons.org/compatiblelicenses
2008/11/4 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com
Cheers.
Well, that's a completely useless license. Congratulations to the WMF for wasting a whole load of time. How are we meant to use it when the deadline was 2 days ago? Anything added to our projects since then would need to be deleted in order to transfer to CC, which includes any content added during the discussion about whether we want to switch which will take some time.
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2008/11/3 Petr Kadlec petr.kadlec@gmail.com:
I'm finishing a "licenses on Wikipedia" speech I'm going to have tomorrow. I want to check something in the GFDL text. I get 404… and after a while, refresh shows "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3, 3 November 2008"… :-)
Going to check the changes… and possibly rewrite some parts of my presentation :-/
-- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]
"Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.
This could be a problem with anything that isn't text such as images videos and sounds.
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 3:03 AM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2008/11/3 Petr Kadlec petr.kadlec@gmail.com:
I'm finishing a "licenses on Wikipedia" speech I'm going to have tomorrow. I want to check something in the GFDL text. I get 404… and after a while, refresh shows "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3, 3 November 2008"… :-)
Going to check the changes… and possibly rewrite some parts of my presentation :-/
-- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]
"Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.
This could be a problem with anything that isn't text such as images videos and sounds.
I dont see why. It doesnt mention text specifically. images, videos, sounds, sheet music, whatever ... are all copyrightable works. What is the problem you are seeing?
-- John Vandenberg
2008/11/3 John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com:
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 3:03 AM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2008/11/3 Petr Kadlec petr.kadlec@gmail.com:
I'm finishing a "licenses on Wikipedia" speech I'm going to have tomorrow. I want to check something in the GFDL text. I get 404… and after a while, refresh shows "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3, 3 November 2008"… :-)
Going to check the changes… and possibly rewrite some parts of my presentation :-/
-- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]
"Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.
This could be a problem with anything that isn't text such as images videos and sounds.
I dont see why. It doesnt mention text specifically. images, videos, sounds, sheet music, whatever ... are all copyrightable works. What is the problem you are seeing?
-- John Vandenberg
We don't offer prominent facilities to edit anything other than text.
2008/11/3 geni geniice@gmail.com:
I dont see why. It doesnt mention text specifically. images, videos, sounds, sheet music, whatever ... are all copyrightable works. What is the problem you are seeing?
We don't offer prominent facilities to edit anything other than text.
Oh, I get it. You're saying that we're only a MMC for the textual components, and that for everything else we just do conventional hosting of discrete works?
I'm not sure this is actually a problem - it seems like quite a restrictive reading of the license - but I can see why you're flagging it. Something to study this evening...
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