[Foundation-l] Licenses' biodiversity : my big disagreement with the Wikimedia usability initiative's software specifications

[David Gerard]

On 21 February 2011 13:14, Teofilo <teofilowiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> For the time being, the less bad licenses for videos are the "Licence
> art libre" with "specify to the recipient where to access the
> originals (either initial or subsequent)" (1) (but it is not clear if
> the word "recipient" applies only to distribution recipients or also
> means performance viewers and audiences) and the GFDL, from where it
> is possible to argue that an embedded player without a download link
> might not be "transparent enough", and that public performance without
> distribution is anyway not allowed by the GFDL, but that is far from
> being an explicit way to have reusers understand what thay may or may
> not do with the video.


No-one has ever worked out how to do derivatives of GFDL-licensed
internet video that all agree is in full compliance with the GFDL.
Display the full 23 kilobytes of licence text in video at the end?

Even for text, the GFDL is ridiculously painful to follow. So many
reusers of Wikipedia text have been put off by nitpickers stridently
maintaining that their particular attempt to follow the license isn't
good enough.

The GFDL is a terrible, terrible licence. The only reason Wikipedia
ever used it was because there wasn't a better one at the time - if CC
by-sa had existed when Nupedia was started, it would have been CC
by-sa. The GFDL did save everyone else a great deal of time by making
most of the possible mistakes really early, thus serving as a bad
example for others to avoid.

Licenses are *hard* to get right. Hampering reusability is the main
reason licence proliferation is bad; but that it's hard to get a
licence really robust and yet useful is the other reason licence
proliferation is bad.


- d.