[Foundation-l] The license situation

[Erik Moeller]

2008/10/18 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
> The FSF tend to be ideologically driven but at least predictably so.
> CC tend to be more pragmatic which makes them less predicable. We have
> no reason to think that CC would opt for strong copyleft for images
> unless they have made a clear direct commitment to do so. They have
> not.

This argument implies that the GFDL is any more a strong copyleft
license than CC-BY-SA is. I see no reason to assume that is the case.

Yes, we need to work towards a good solution for strong copyleft on
embedded media. CC appears to me to be more logically positioned to
help us solve this problem, because it fits much more neatly in their
mission focus (helping creators of media of all types) than in the
FSF's (supporting free software), and because their license release
cycles tend to be significantly shorter than the FSF's.

Of course you can argue that the CC approach in _general_ has a bias
against freedom and a bias in favor of restrictions. I think that's a
completely legitimate argument, and I would love to see CC become more
proactive in supporting freedom. Their explicit designation of CC-BY
and CC-BY-SA as Free Cultural Works licenses (with a link to the
definition) is an important step in that direction, and I do know from
my personal interactions with CC that there are people in the
organization that would like CC to be more actively promoting the free
licenses over the non-free ones.

Becoming more closely involved with CC is a great way for us to become
an important voice for freedom. For example, I think we can
successfully promote a view that non-free licenses are inappropriate
for collaborative communities.

But irrespective of that, CC has no incentive _not_ to help us solve
the strong copyleft problem: even when viewed as a purely pragmatic
organization, it fits completely within their mission scope to solve
problems like this one. Whether that solution should consist of
modifying CC-BY-SA itself is, in my opinion, legitimately debatable,
though as I said, it seems to be the simplest solution and reduces
license proliferation, which CC is explicitly opposed to at this
point.

What I do not agree with is the notion that GFDL somehow represents an
actual solution to the problem. That understates the massive problems
associated with reuse of GFDL licensed electronic documents and
compatibility with CC-BY-SA resources, it quietly ignores the inherent
contradiction in a strong copyleft interpretation of the GFDL, and it
overstates the significance of weakly varying interpretations of
essentially equivalent legal texts.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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