[Foundation-l] Let's switch to CC-BY-SA

[geni]

On 10/09/2007, Axel Boldt <axelboldt at yahoo.com> wrote:
> When we started, the CC-BY-SA didn't exist and GFDL was the only
> available license that expressed the "free-to-use-and-modify-but-
> creators-need-to-be-attributed-and-the-license-cannot-be-changed"
> idea for textual materials.

Nyet. Also nupedia FAL and a few other odds and ends.

> Since then, we have largely ignored
> the more arcane features of the GFDL,

Some have some have not.

>essentially telling our users "If
>
> you keep the license and provide a link back to the original, you're
> welcome to use our materials." In other words, we have always used GFDL

Actually wording generally a bit more subtle than that.

> as if it were CC-BY-SA. This practice is unfair for two reasons:
>
>     * People who want to use our content have to trust that we won't
> enforce the more arcane features of the GFDL in the future, such as the
>
> requirement to change the article's title or to explicitly list at
> least
> five principal authors.

Wikimedia can't really enforce anything since it holds very little of
the IP under the GFDL.



>     * Contributors to Wikimedia projects have to trust that no one will
>
> exploit the GFDL in the future and encumber their materials with
> non-changeable text ("invariant sections").

Being worked on in theory.

> By contrast, the CC-BY-SA license has the following advantages:
>
>     * It is simple and fits our precise requirements.

You ever read the legal text?


>     * It is promoted, maintained and translated by an active
> organization, Creative Commons.
>

FSF is active. Hopefully we will find out soon if they are active with
regard to things other than software.

>     * It is better known and more widely used than the GFDL, at least
> outside of Wikimedia projects, increasing the potential for re-use and
> collaboration.
>
> We should do the right thing, bring theory and practice into alignment,
> and switch to the CC-BY-SA license once and for all.
>
> How to switch
> =============
>
> Here's the plan: we issue a press release and post a prominent website
> banner, saying that from some specified date on, the current and all
> future versions of all materials on Wikimedia servers will be
> considered
> released under CC-BY-SA. Any content creator who does not agree with
> this change is invited to have their materials removed before that
> date.

And the derivs? You would risk shredding wikipedia.

>
> I don't see how any good-faith contributor who has researched the
> licenses could disagree with this change and prefer GFDL over CC-BY-SA.
>

Short answer is differences with CC with regards to what counts as a derivative.



> A small group of disgruntled former contributors will probably use the
> occasion to get their material wiped from our servers, and I don't see
> anything wrong with that. Some trolls will attempt to game the system,
> but we can deal with that.

Can't. We don't have the capacity to delete on that scale.

>
> All materials in the history up to the specified deadline should
> probably remain available under GFDL only; this makes it easier to deal
> with the material of contributors who disagree with the change. And we
> need to find some way to deal with discussion and policy pages.
>
> I realize that this opt-out procedure is not perfectly clean from a
> legalistic standpoint,

One way of putting it.

>but neither is our current distortion of the
> GFDL. If we look at it pragmatically, considering what YouTube and the
> Internet Archive can get away with, there doesn't seem to be any
> appreciable danger that we could be successfully sued over this matter;
>

Youtube have been sued rather a lot of times.

> the number of true copyright violations that appear on Wikipedia every
> day are a much bigger cause for concern.

Nyet speed we deal with them keeps us fairly safe there.

> And ethically speaking,
> there's
> nothing wrong with the opt-out approach since the two licenses are, in
> essence and intent, identical.

Nope. Dissagreement over what counts as a deriv is rather significant.


The core of it is that GFDL thinks that if you insert a GFDL object
into a larger document the document should be GFDL. CC does not except
in the case of music with video.

One upshot of this is would be required to delete every GFDL image or
at the very least we would be unable to use them in articles.

At the present time our best option appears to be to fix the GSFDL:

http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gsfdl-draft-1.html

Then get the GFDL modified to allow us to switch to the GSFDL (as
proposed in the next propopsed version of the GFDL).

Coments on how to fix the FDL licenses are being collected here:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GFDL_suggestions

-- 
geni