[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[Sam Johnston]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 12:59 AM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> Flexibility has it's limits.

Right, and this one has a deadline that's fast approaching. Here's
some things I'd like to know from a poll:
 - Demographics?
 - Contributions to date: Authored articles / Edited articles /
Uploaded media / Minor edits / Administration / Other
 - Individual Attribution: Critical / Nice to have / Neutral /
Unnecessary / Harmful
 - Have you reused?
  - Did you attribute: Everyone / Article / Article & Wikipedia /
Wikipedia / Nobody
  - Was it: Too hard / Hard / Neither easy nor hard / Easy / Trivial
 - Priority: Freedom / Attribution
 - What level of contribution (if any) is worthy of attribution?
 - Do you prefer to attribute: Everyone Individually / History Page /
Top 5 Individually / Article / Wikipedia / Nobody
 - How do you feel about the GFDL->CC-BY-SA migration?
 - Are you: More likely / About the same / Less likely to reuse?

>> You can argue all day long about what licenses "actually" say. Ultimately I
>> don't think there will be that much of an issue in that area.
>
> Matthew Katzer and Kamind Associates tried that one. They lost.

That case is completely different - it's about "misappropriation of a
software program by a company that publishes model train hobbyist
software"[2], not a community seeking to relicense its 'own' content.

>>The real thing
>> we need to discover are the needs of the WMF. What kind of attribution is *most
>> consistent with the goals of the projects? *Flexible attribution of course.
>> We are leaving the GFDL for good reason - no need to drag it along with us
>> in the change to CC-BY-SA.

Exactly. This whole discussion reminds me of the obnoxious advertising
clause in the old BSD licenses[1]:

"As originally distributed, the BSD license had an extra clause,
requiring authors of all works deriving from a BSD-licensed work to
include an acknowledgment of the original source. <snip> This clause
has been objected to on the grounds that as people changed the license
to reflect their name or organisation it led to escalating advertising
requirements when programs were combined together in a software
distribution—every occurrence of the license with a different name
requires a separate acknowledgement— the Free Software Foundation has
cited the requirement for 75 such acknowledgments when advertising a
1997 version of NetBSD.[3] In addition, it presents a legal problem
for those wishing to publish BSD-licensed software which relies upon
separate programs using the more-restrictive GPL: the advertising
clause is incompatible with the GPL, which does not allow the addition
of restrictions beyond those it already imposes.
The advertising clause was removed from the official BSD license text
on 22 July 1999"

> Changes we would like to see in CC-BY-SA-3.X/4.0 are a very separate
> issue from how to we manage the switchover to 3.0. There are some
> other very big players in the CC field. Expecting CC to go along with
> whatever we decide is not a sensible strategy (particularly when you
> consider at least one of the crediting options suggested would allow
> for the crediting of every flickr image to yahoo).

CC are most likely to go along with what is sensible and are very
likely to listen to WMF when defining 'sensible'. The license as it is
is pretty damn close to good enough (hence the dropping of the wiki
license?) and I certainly don't see any show-stoppers. And comparing a
commercial online storage service with us really is scraping the
bottom of the FUD barrel.

Sam

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license#UC_Berkeley_advertising_clause
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/technology/14commons.html?_r=1