[Foundation-l] Licensing resolution

[Erik Moeller]

2009/5/21 Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net>:
> In light of the vote results announced regarding the proposed licensing
> update, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has unanimously
> passed the following resolution:
>
> Resolved that:
>
> Whereas the Wikimedia community, in a project-wide vote, has expressed
> very strong support for changing the licensing terms of Wikimedia sites,
> and whereas the Board of Trustees has previously adopted a license
> update resolution requesting that such a change be made possible, the
> Board hereby declares its intent to implement these changes.
> Accordingly, the Wikimedia Foundation exercises its option under Version
> 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License to relicense the Wikimedia
> sites as Massive Multiauthor Collaborations under the Creative Commons
> Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, effective June 15, 2009. The Board
> of Trustees hereby instructs the Executive Director to have all
> Wikimedia licensing terms updated and terms of use implemented
> consistent with the proposal at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update

Woo-hoo! :-)

Once again, a big *thank you* to the licensing committee for
administering the voting process. All the volunteers on the committee
have been hugely helpful. I want to especially mention Robert Rohde,
without whom the result probably wouldn't have been ready last week.

The work of the LiCom doesn't end here - we'll now develop a strategy
and checklist to update all the relevant licensing terms. There are
also a couple of open questions that we should discuss a bit further
before implementing the change, in particular, the best process and
policies for handling externally created CC-BY-SA content to be
imported into our projects. I'll post more on that very soon.

This is a big day for free culture. :-)

All best,
Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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