[Commons-l] All about Wikimania, future projects, licenses, etc etc

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/7/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I went to this talk
> http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:MH1 in which I
> found out a new draft of the GFDL is open for comment at the moment.
> The new GFDL has a clause about 'excerpts' where an excerpt can be
> distributed without the full license text. see
[snip]

My apologies for not mentioning the GFDL/SFDL drafts on commons-l
before. I'd brought them up on foundation-l and wiken-l a few times
and thought I'd pointed them out on commons-l, but it seems I did not.

We have a page setup for FDL suggestions at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GFDL_suggestions

It does not currently have any related to the excerpting rules, though
it very much needs some and I would have already written some but I
didn't want to monopolize the page. *Please* take some time to put out
your ideas there.


>So maybe we (Wikimedia) could have this:
>(now) GFDL1.2 -> GFDL2 -> GSFDL === CC-BY-SA?
>OK why is this important? Creative Commons' goals are not necessarily
>ours, etc etc. I think this is a direction we should try to go forward
>in because in essence we have the same goals, and keeping distinct
>licenses for no good reason makes understanding the situation
>unnecessarily complex, and thus harms our ability to communicate our
>mission and vision to as wide an audience as possible.
>Note 'no good reason'. If good reasons exist, we should keep the distinctions.

The 'good reason' I see is that, according to a somewhat recent post
by Lessig that I can't currently find,  the creative commons thinks
-SA ought to be a minimal/weak copyleft. I.e. it's okay to use an
unmodified SA work as in integral part of a non-free work.

This is more of a copyleft in the way that LGPL is copyleft. The GFDL
is a more typical copyleft license (like the GPL)
[http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2007-05-08-fdl-scope].

It's very important to have a clearly copyleft free content license. A
full copyleft has the impact of using the pre-existing base of free
content to encourage the creation of more free content, while a
reduced copyleft doesn't really have that impact... but thats a
discussion for another place.

I don't think having two popular distinct free licenses is harmful.
But what is utterly important is that it be made abundantly clear that
it is okay to create works combining them, and what the rules should
be governing this. This isn't the case today.

Getting compatibility right might be somewhat hard but it will be a
worthwhile effort. You might find a page I wrote on the compatibility
subject some months ago interesting:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/An_alternative_model_for_license_compatibility