The CC-BY-SA license was certainly available -- it's one of the core CC licenses, and has been since the start.
The main reason Wikipedia had changes is, I believe, that the GFDL is simply a bad license for a wiki: the GFDL requires individual authors to be listed, and has other restrictions that make content reuse a bit cumbersome. Secondarily, there was the incompatibility with various other copyleft sources that are using the CC-BY-SA type licenses.
Now, Wikinews is not using a copyleft license: CC-BY is _less_ restrictive than CC-BY-SA, and was chosen to be so on purpose. Our license allows much easier reuse of our content by commercial and non-commercial sources, with or without changes, as long as it's attributed back to us. The CC-BY-SA license, however, requires that if any changes are made in downstream reuse of content, the changed content is made available under a similar license. This, by definition, is more restrictive than just a plain attribution requirement. And this is the reason why Wikipedia content can't be copied to Wikinews: we are not able to offer the guarantee that downstream reuse of Wikinews content will follow CC-BY-SA.
You can see the original discussion / voting at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/License
-ilya
On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.orgwrote:
Commons is the most compelling project to be compatible with. If you actually look into the details of CC-BY-SA it is the license Wikinews would probably have chosen were it available at the time. CC-BY-SA makes Wikipedia content vastly more useful to a lot of places and clears up significant potential fair use issues quoting content on non-CC-BY-SA sites.
Remember, Wikipedia ended up GFDL as a historical accident. They've worked from that - including strongarming 'The Bearded One' - into writing a get-out-of-GFDL clause. CC-BY-SA is *currently* the best choice for the WMF mission. I don't think it was available when Wikinews went from PD to CC-BY.
Brian.
-----Original Message----- From: wikinews-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikinews-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jason Safoutin Sent: 30 May 2009 16:26 To: Wikinews mailing list Subject: Re: [Wikinews-l] Wikipedia's 'In the news'
Why though? Then what purpose does it serve to have changed WP to CC-BY-SA if it still prevents copying from WP to WN or the likes? In that sense, it really makes no logical sense. I thought the goal was to make the WP license more compatible with other project licenses? If so then changing it to CC-BY-SA isn't doing that at all (aside from commons).
-- Jason Safoutin Wikinews accredited reporter and administrator jason.safoutin@wikinewsie.org
Paul Williams wrote:
2009/5/30 Jason Safoutin <jason.safoutin@wikinewsie.org mailto:jason.safoutin@wikinewsie.org>
Why could we not copy from WP? SA is just the basic same as regularCC
BY. If copying from WP will still not be allowed, then why did theygo
through the trouble to even change the license if its still not compatible with other projects?CC-BY is not the same as CC-BY-SA - we (Wikinews) must publish our content under CC-BY-SA if we wish to copy from WP.
Regards,
Paul Williams paul@skenmy.com mailto:paul@skenmy.com
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-- Jason Safoutin Wikinews accredited reporter and administrator jason.safoutin@wikinewsie.org
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