[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[Mike Linksvayer]

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 4:11 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> We are discussing all kinds of "arguments" around the license change from
> GFDL to CC-by-sa. I am not impressed at all by the quality of the arguments.
> It seems to me that there are two trains of thought. There are the people
> who want THEIR attribution and who will come up with every conceivable and
> inconceivable argument to get as much personal exposure as possible. On the
> other hand there are the people who do not care that much about their
> attribution, they care more for interoperability, they want to have the best
> license that will ENABLE cooperation and collaboration.

I don't think the trains of thought are that easily separated, but
that's a great observation.

Not entirely relevant given the constraints of this discussion (the
license update one), but it's an interesting question whether legally
required attribution gets one closer to "a world in which  every
single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." In
another context (scientific data), CC (its Science Commons project)
decided the answer is definitely no, see
http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/.
Separately, in addition to seeing if there are ways CC licenses can be
improved to facilitate attribution in the context of massively
collaborative works, I'd like to see the eventual next version clarify
how one can waive attribution (CC stopped versioning licenses without
BY long ago for good simplicity and interoperability reasons).
Acknowledging again that this discussion is constrained, it is great
to see consideration of attribution in light of the needs of free
knowledge.

> So far I have not heard any arguments why the CC-by-sa cannot do this. I
> have only heard a lot of FUD that I qualify as narcistic. FUD that does not
> contribute to more FREE colloaboration and re-use. I can understand why the
> shared alike part is deemed to be important. I can understand why commercial
> organisations are not free to just use material in any context. But that is
> all beside the point because it applies equally to either license.

Just in case crazy people read the second to last sentence above in
the future -- neither license puts special restrictions on users based
on their nature, organizational or not, commercial or not. :-)

> The one argument against the CC-by-sa that takes the prize is the notion
> that we will have less influence with Creative Commons ... yet another great
> narcissistic argument.

I don't think that argument is narcissistic at all. Wikimedians either
need lots of influence or very strong reason to believe that the
steward of whatever license used is going to preserve the license as a
vehicle for promoting the goal of free knowledge. I think that with CC
BY-SA you'll get both, but I'm pretty biased, working for CC.

Mike