[Foundation-l] The license situation

[Erik Moeller]

2008/10/18 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
> Hard vs soft copyleft

The actual text of the GFDL and CC-BY-SA is not substantially
different with regard to the copyleft of adaptations. The official
position of Creative Commons on this issue is reflected in the
statement of intent regarding the CC-BY-SA license:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent

I don't think there's any basis on which to argue that Creative
Commons Intent is substantially different from the FSF's with the
GFDL, and this statement explicitly promises that CC-BY-SA will never
be re-worded to have a "softer" copyleft.

That said, we've been continuing the dialog with CC about how to build
a more explicit hard copyleft. I strongly believe that a  strong
copyleft option for photography needs to exist, but to me, this is a
separate problem. The GFDL doesn't solve this, and as has been pointed
out here before, the current beliefs and practices (some people
believe that combinations of any kind need to be copyleft, but we mix
GFDL text with content under different licenses) are inherently
contradictory. A solution addressing this problem explicitly is
needed.

Creative Commons is not at all opposed to such a solution. My
preferred "fix" at this point is a CC-BY-SA 3.1 version which
explicitly invokes copyleft for scenarios of semantic embedding, but
where copyleft is taken to mean "combine with a work under any license
that's compliant with the Definition of Free Cultural Works", as
opposed to "the exact same license".

> the GFDL 1.2 only images
> People who uploaded images under the GFDL because it's clumsiness
> makes conventional commercial use tricky.

I don't see how this relates to the re-licensing language in GFDL 1.3.
Whether or not we want to continue using "GFDL 1.2 only" content is a
separate decision. Partially, this seems to be a debate for the
Commons community about whether GFDL 1.2 only is "free enough", given
the encumbrances you mention.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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