[Foundation-l] The license situation

[Erik Moeller]

2008/10/18 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
> So CC are saying that they may chose to drift towards harder copyleft
> but may equally chose not to. That is not an equivalent of a hard
> copyleft position.

Given that the _substance_ of the actual legal text is essentially the
same, we're talking here about the interpretations of very similar
legal language. Before CC put out this statement, critics argued that
adopting CC-BY-SA could put you at risk, because CC might openly adopt
positions or add clarifications that weaken your position. And in that
context, the CC statement is key. It includes commitments such as:
"Any clarification of whether a use constitutes an adaptation for the
purposes of Attribution-ShareAlike licenses may only broaden the scope
of uses considered adaptations rather than collections."

If there is still a case to be made that adopting CC-BY-SA puts you in
a substantially worse position than adopting GFDL if your aim is to
protect your work with strong copyleft, I'd be really interested in a
thorough argument to that effect.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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