Andrew Whitworth wrote: Let me second that request (without the part about the pain in the ass tough). I really would like to understand better why you would consider a cc-by-sa license not acceptable. Ant

Florence Devouard wrote: Some of this is that I get very confused when I talk about Creative Commons licenses. You are talking about a specific license here, but that is IMHO one of the problems with this license. I've known the Free Software Foundation, and RMS in particular, for some time now. I may not agree with everything that RMS stands for, but he and the FSF is generally predictable and RMS has been very consistent for some time on the fundamental issues of intellectual property freedom. I don't see the Free Software Foundation changing their licenses in a dramatic fashion to lose sight of that basic quest for Intellectual Property (software and the written word, but also trademarks and patents too) freedom. In this regard, I suppose I can say that I don't have the same level of trust with Creative Commons...even if other may put the same or more trust that Creative Commons on this front. For example, there are several non-commercial only licenses in the Creative Commons suite. The Free Software Foundation has been very consistent that non-commercial use only is actually harmful to the basic freedoms of IP content and has never endorsed any such license... and all of the FSF licenses openly encourage for-profit activities with content that uses their licenses. They have also encouraged (unlike the WMF I might add) others to make a commercial profit... if possible... with intellectual property that actually belongs to the FSF using no other restriction other than simply using the terms of the licenses that they have already published. This even includes the FSF logo I might add as well. That is a very bold statement in terms of freedoms of content. In all this I'm not saying that the CC-by-SA license is the spawn of the devil or anything else that crass. Some very good work has gone into the development of the Creative Commons licenses, and I generally support the overall goals of those involved in that effort. I just haven't released much content in those licenses, and as a matter of personal preference generally try not to use those licenses unless the people I'm working with insist upon a Creative Commons license of some sort or another. I'm not even really sure I can put it in words more clearly than this, but in short, I really don't like the license. It is also more or less why I like one political party over another, but I feel others are entitled to their own opinions on the subject as long as they don't force me to change my position. I also think the WMF was very lucky to have started out with the GFDL instead of other licenses, and that the experiment to create an encyclopedia based upon the GFDL has been wildly successful. While many of those involved with Wikipedia and the other sister projects may not really be concerned about licenses and legal nonsense, I do believe that much of the success of these projects has to do with the freedoms enshrined within the GFDL...in spite of problems with the GFDL that we all know that it has. -- Robert Horning

On 24/11/2007, Michael Noda <michael.noda(a)gmail.com> wrote: All other CC licenses are irrelevant to this CC-wiki license. No sure if anyone used it ever. -- geni

Andrew Whitworth wrote: To start with, I haven't licensed these contributions under any other license, so introducing something like CC-by-SA is irrelevant to the discussion here other than as a purely philosophical point. I will state that I have reviewed many of the content licenses that were available before the GFDL, and many that have since come out. One of the reasons (among others) that I contributed to Wikimedia projects was explicitly because the content was using the GFDL license, and it was a conscious decision on my part when I first got involved. This isn't to say that I haven't added a few things to projects (like Wikinews, for instance) that use other licensing arrangements, but I have also not spent considerable amounts of time on those projects either. More to the point, I support many of the philosophical goals that RMS introduced when the GFDL was originally put together, as I have seen a very real need to have something like a document-oriented GPL-like license. In this regard, I think many of the Creative Commons licenses miss the mark, and there is a strong non-commercial use only philosophy on the part of those working on the Creative Commons licenses. Again, nearly every time I get into a discussion about CC licenses I get all kinds of people that criticize me because I'm not intimately familiar with all of the variations of the CC license suit...but I consider that to also be a major flaw in CC licenses. There are so many that intelligent discussions about them are hard to make. I know you have mentioned a specific license here, but the confusion is very real. Until recently, all the FSF had for licenses was the LGPL, GPL, and GFDL.... and the "domain" of each license was rather clear. As to why Jimbo went the route of using the GFDL when Wikipedia started out... I'll have to let Jimbo answer that himself. But the decision was made and is irreversable, at least from my perspective. We can't just switch Wikipedia from the GFDL to CC-by-SA tomorrow even if 99.9% of all Wikipedia participants agree to the decision. I highly doubt such a switch would gain even that level of support, but that is irrelevant to this discussion. I know Mike here is trying to suggest that the WMF is talking with the FSF in terms of trying to make something work for Wikipedia, but I'm also saying that you can't please everybody at once either. That seems to be the goal here to dilute the GFDL to something "harmonized" with the CC-by-SA license (or is it another CC license?). Each of these licenses serves a different niche, and I don't necessarily think it is in the best interest of Wikipedia and the other sister projects to "force" a harmonization. BTW, if I read your reply here Andrew, you are suggesting I'm being a pain in the ass to insist that the original terms I released my content under (the GFDL) is something that can't be casually dismissed by a community vote of some sort. I can't speak for "most people", but I can speak for myself. I want to not only preserve the ability to make my contributions freely available, but I also want to maintain the current philosphy of the GPL/GFDL that prohibits others from preventing future distribution, or asserting copyright on content they haven't written. I could also go into my long and extensive career in the software industry, but I'll just leave it here that I've written software that I've placed "in the public domain" only to see somebody else claim that they had written it instead.... and I was powerless to force them to change that claim. Most of the GFDL is a round-about way to force an admission that others were involved in the creation of the content if you reuse or modify the content in the future. I've also unfortunately signed some NDAs that prevent me from passing on to the rest of the world some very hard earned knowledge that I've gained over the years, and I find it surprisingly liberating to work with individuals who try to avoid these kind of legal traps. I would like to point out that there are also other benefits of the current GFDL that have not been stated so far on this thread that are getting over looked. -- Robert Horning

On 23/11/2007, Robert Horning <robert_horning(a)netzero.net> wrote: Then why did you hit "submit" each time? I suspect I've lost track of the particular hypothetical offence you are speaking of. A violation of your copyright that you'll win even if the reuser points to "or later version"? If it's not a future version of the GFDL, then "or later version" can't possibly apply. - d.

On 23/11/2007, Robert Horning <robert_horning(a)netzero.net> wrote: Chapter and verse please? - d.

Andrew Whitworth ha scritto: To be precise, Wikinews is licensed as cc-by, not cc-by-sa. I think the share-alike clause was dropped so that the articles could be reused nore freely, allowing someone else to copyright derivative works but above all using them everywhere, without the need of licensing something else with the same license. I don't know which license is freer, it's mostly a matter on how you look at it. It is very unfortunate that licenses that are so similar like GFDL and cc-by-sa are mutually incompatible. Cruccone

Robert Horning wrote: Wikinews is Cc-by which is AFAIK compatible with GFDL, so there shouldn't be any problem moving content from Wikinews to Wikipedia (there would be from wikipedia to wikinews, though). Why is it "completely incompatible"? Mike, are there any issues with incorporing Cc-by content to a GFDL one? That would need quite content revision... Do you prefer the previous "Public Domain license" wikinews had? I agree that having a different license is not something to encourage, but as the project scope required a different one, it's much better a Cc-by than PD. Commons encourages dual licensing GFDL+Cc-by-sa

Slashdot is not some random online source, it is one of the largest and oldest sites of its type. Nevertheless, I would never cite it for anything other than information about Slashdot, since it only reports existing news stories and links to them, so you can just cite that story. As for citing Wikinews - we're always telling people not to cite Wikipedia, why is Wikinews any more reliable? I know you have a system of "publishing" articles, which certainly helps, but is it enough?

On Nov 23, 2007 12:27 PM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111(a)gmail.com> wrote: I thought Wikinews uses CC-BY (without the SA).

I think you are simply wrong there. I don't think anyone has suggested that. I don't think anyone disputes that that would be illegal.

On 23/11/2007, Robert Horning <robert_horning(a)netzero.net> wrote: It does pose an interesting problem, certainly, but it's not as bad as it seems at first glance, especially if we're happy to leave the extant history dumps intact and apply the new license as of, say, revision two billion and higher... First off, you need to quantify new content added rather than, say, edit wars; I believe there are existing algorithms to manage this. Filter out only those content-adding posts - maybe 50%, maybe 5% - and then check to see if that content still exists in the final version. All that stage can be done mechanically, once you've coded it up, and done offline with a database dump. Then the human stage - you have a checklist of diffs and pages to look at to see if the content is material; if it is, you edit it out or rewrite it and mark the page as clear. Still effort, but a lot less, especially if the author's motivated to help make sure we do it properly. Bingo. And those terms include your handing to the FSF the power to vary the exact terms, remaining "similar in spirit to the present version", allowing alterations "to address new problems or concerns". We're not talking about declaring that the GFDL is now replaced by Some Other License; we're talking about letting an existing process, where the license is slowly updated and polished and streamlined, trickle along with the aim of eventually getting to the point where the two major free-content 'viral' licenses are functionally the same. This doesn't have to happen tomorrow, or happen in one jump - it might be in 2015, with GFDL 1.7 and CC-BY-SA 6.2! - but it's perfectly above-board. I mean, the fundamental principles of the GFDL and CC-BY-SA are the same. I own this; I let anyone republish it or develop it; they have to keep my name; they have to keep these conditions. Everything else is administrative details, and it's the administrative details (like how the viral aspect of the license should work, how attribution should be handled, how we deal with a plethora of authors, etc etc etc) that these "revision clauses" are meant to help us adjust. Assuming they do stay similar in spirit, I really don't see a problem here, and I am a little lost as to why people are objecting so vigorously! I can't help but feel that there's a lot of arguments with shadows, people objecting to things which weren't actually proposed... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Andrew Gray wrote: How can you efficiently do that? -We have article at revision A -Anon vandalises article -Anon adds content needed to be wikified. -User reverts to version A -User wikifies and rewrites anon's text. A machine check would attribute the last addition solely to the user, while it's a derivative of the anonymous one, even if it's clearly stated on the summary.