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.org> wrote:
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 regular CC
>     BY. If copying from WP will still not be allowed, then why did they go
>     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>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikinews-l mailing list
> Wikinews-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
>


--
Jason Safoutin
Wikinews accredited reporter and administrator
jason.safoutin@wikinewsie.org


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