David Gerard writes:
"So what's wrong with the GFDL?"
That's gotta be the first question, and you should be able to manage five paragraphs without pausing.
I am so excited by David Gerard's implicit volunteering to draft a great answer to this great question!
(Evil laughter.)
--Mike
2008/11/7 Mike Godwin mgodwin@wikimedia.org:
David Gerard writes:
"So what's wrong with the GFDL?" That's gotta be the first question, and you should be able to manage five paragraphs without pausing.
I am so excited by David Gerard's implicit volunteering to draft a great answer to this great question! (Evil laughter.)
Muwahaha yourself. *cracks knuckles, gets typing*
Q. So what's wrong with the GFDL?
A. The GFDL was written as a licence for software manuals on paper with one or a few authors. It's not at all suited to wiki content with possibly hundreds of editors. Wikipedia's predecessor, Nupedia, adopted it at the time because the CC by-sa license didn't exist yet.
* The GFDL is very difficult to follow in practice. Almost no-one knows how to follow it properly - including its authors, the Free Software Foundation, when the Wikimedia Foundation has asked them directly to advise on this. ** Trying to obey can be onerous. Per the letter of the license, every significant (greater than fair use) quotation from a GFDL work needs a copy of the license (three or so pages of print) attached. GFDL content is almost impossible to reuse in audio or video content for this reason. ** Although easy to follow on the web (link to a local copy of the GFDL) or in a book (reproduce the three-page license), it's almost impossible to reuse in shorter pieces. ** The "how to comply" pages on various Wikipedias are more what individual editors think is a good idea, not necessarily what the letter of the license says - as has been complained of by reusers accused of violation for not following this month's interpretation. ** Even cutting and pasting text between two Wikipedia articles is technically a violation unless the full author list for that piece of text is attached. This is not workable on a wiki. * CC by-sa is becoming the usual licence for free content intended to stay free ("copyleft"). That's a whole world of text, images, movies and so on that Wikimedia stuff can't be mixed with. (A software analogy is using a copyleft license that's not GPL-compatible - it makes your work an isolated island for no particular gain.)
Q. Why didn't the FSF just say "OK, the next GFDL is the same as CC by-sa"?
A. Because, despite Wikimedia sites being by far the largest corpus of GFDL content, the FSF needed to keep important details of how the license works the same for its original audience: authors of software manuals.
There. How's that for a start?
- d.
2008/11/7 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
Muwahaha yourself. *cracks knuckles, gets typing*
Q. So what's wrong with the GFDL?
A. The GFDL was written as a licence for software manuals on paper with one or a few authors. It's not at all suited to wiki content with possibly hundreds of editors.
Every license tends to fall apart when you start throwing that number of authors at it
** Even cutting and pasting text between two Wikipedia articles is technically a violation unless the full author list for that piece of text is attached. This is not workable on a wiki.
This doesn't change with CC-BY-SA.
Q. Why didn't the FSF just say "OK, the next GFDL is the same as CC by-sa"?
A. Because, despite Wikimedia sites being by far the largest corpus of GFDL content, the FSF needed to keep important details of how the license works the same for its original audience: authors of software manuals.
Close. From what I can tell software manuals actually use features in the GFDL that are not in CC-BY-SA such as cover texts and invariant sections.
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