As Sue has mentioned, the board earlier agreed on a statement regarding the license transition, which is as follows:
The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation invites the Wikimedia community to vote on this proposal to license Wikimedia material so it is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), while retaining dual licensing with the GNU Free Documentation License. The Board has evaluated possible licensing options for Wikimedia material, and believes that this proposal is the best available path towards achieving our collective goal to collect, develop and disseminate educational material, and make it available to people everywhere, free of charge, in perpetuity.
--Michael Snow
Michael Snow wrote:
The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation invites the Wikimedia community to vote on this proposal to license Wikimedia material so it is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), while retaining dual licensing with the GNU Free Documentation License. The Board has evaluated possible licensing options for Wikimedia material, and believes that this proposal is the best available path towards achieving our collective goal to collect, develop and disseminate educational material, and make it available to people everywhere, free of charge, in perpetuity.
To elaborate a little further, speaking now in a personal capacity. Exploring the fine details of copyleft licensing gets into complex issues, some of which we've debated on this list. The complexity means many subtly different positions are possible, and we could probably debate endlessly without reaching ideal solutions to those subtle differences. That's part of why (as mentioned) individual board and staff members, like everyone else, are free and encouraged to express their own views about these matters.
By comparison, though, the vote we will have is more simple and straightforward. It's not an effort to create a platonically perfect license in the ideal world, which is likely impossible, rather it's asking whether the relicensing allowed by the GFDL 1.3 is progress in a practical sense. I think that's what we mean in agreeing that this is the "best available" course at this time.
--Michael Snow
Hoi, Where can we vote? Thanks, GerardM
2009/3/24 Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net
As Sue has mentioned, the board earlier agreed on a statement regarding the license transition, which is as follows:
The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation invites the Wikimedia community to vote on this proposal to license Wikimedia material so it is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), while retaining dual licensing with the GNU Free Documentation License. The Board has evaluated possible licensing options for Wikimedia material, and believes that this proposal is the best available path towards achieving our collective goal to collect, develop and disseminate educational material, and make it available to people everywhere, free of charge, in perpetuity.
--Michael Snow
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2009/3/23 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, Where can we vote?
Hi,
to clarify: the vote isn't yet open; Michael just posted the Board positioning statement that will be accompanying the vote when it's launched. The key documents have now been finalized and are in the process of being translated. (The key pages are linked from http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update ), and the technical setup is in progress. A current working timeline is at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Timeline ; there are some internal and external dependencies where we might slip forward a bit further, but I hope that we can launch and wrap up the vote in April as planned.
Thanks to the volunteer licensing committee for all the help so far.
Erik
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, Where can we vote? Thanks, GerardM
2009/3/24 Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net
As Sue has mentioned, the board earlier agreed on a statement regarding the license transition, which is as follows:
The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation invites the Wikimedia community to vote on this proposal
--Michael Snow
My question isn't so much when and where, but rather who can vote on this proposal. More to the point, stakeholders in the content of Wikimedia sites includes a whole bunch of people who may not necessarily fit the criteria that is typical for voting on WMF board members and stewards.... myself included. I haven't exactly been an active participant on this mailing list, nor lately on many of the Wikimedia projects, but I have contributed a fair amount of content to the Wikimedia projects over the years spanning multiple projects.
I certainly think my voice ought to count for something, together with other people who are in my position and situation.
-- Robert Horning ____________________________________________________________ You will believe your eyes! Click here for great whale watching packages! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2241/fc/BLSrjpYXA9BuDfbZl1RojIfunbW5n...
Robert Horning wrote:
My question isn't so much when and where, but rather who can vote on this proposal. More to the point, stakeholders in the content of Wikimedia sites includes a whole bunch of people who may not necessarily fit the criteria that is typical for voting on WMF board members and stewards.... myself included. I haven't exactly been an active participant on this mailing list, nor lately on many of the Wikimedia projects, but I have contributed a fair amount of content to the Wikimedia projects over the years spanning multiple projects.
I certainly think my voice ought to count for something, together with other people who are in my position and situation.
I quite agree with you, and if you check out the licensing update page on Meta http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update you'll find that voting eligibility is based on a quite low number of edits, made any time before the cutoff date. Given the nature of the question, we understand that anyone who has a history with us should be able to have input, whether or not they are currently active. Actually, the edit threshold was just changed from 10 to 25 (still pretty low) by Erik, maybe he can explain the thinking behind that, as I wasn't aware of that decision.
--Michael Snow
Michael Snow wrote:
Robert Horning wrote:
I certainly think my voice ought to count for something, together with other people who are in my position and situation.
I quite agree with you, and if you check out the licensing update page on Meta http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update you'll find that voting eligibility is based on a quite low number of edits, made any time before the cutoff date. Given the nature of the question, we understand that anyone who has a history with us should be able to have input, whether or not they are currently active. Actually, the edit threshold was just changed from 10 to 25 (still pretty low) by Erik, maybe he can explain the thinking behind that, as I wasn't aware of that decision.
--Michael Snow
In my case, I have several thousand edits on each of multiple projects, although I didn't qualify to vote in the most recent board elections. I'm not necessarily objecting to not being eligible to vote in those elections, but this is a significantly different situation.
Thanks for clarifying this point.
-- Robert Horning ____________________________________________________________ Click for great deals on extra fine men's wedding bands. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2241/fc/BLSrjpYYOxdmpR6YPlZuSmNnqEQij...
2009/3/24 Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net:
Actually, the edit threshold was just changed from 10 to 25 (still pretty low) by Erik, maybe he can explain the thinking behind that, as I wasn't aware of that decision.
The only reason to tweak the configuration was to move forward the cut-off date (allowing more users to vote) while excluding any potential sleeper accounts created to specifically hit the 10 edit limit.
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