[Textbook-l] Wikibooks licensing news update

[Karl Wick]

Following is great news from the Wikizine email that is sent out. For anyone
who has not heard, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which controls the
GFDL, the license that Wikibooks, Wikipedia, and the other Wikimedia
projects use, is considering an update to make the license compatible with a
Creative Commons license. This will help make the materials that we create
on Wikibooks more usable from a practical, licensing viewpoint.

This is totally unexpected and exciting for me and could not be better news
(just last week I sent out an email complaining about how great, but
difficult it would be for for something like this to happen).

I feel like God answered my prayer!

Amen.

Karl "Carlos" Benjamin W.


Year: 2007  Week: 48   Number: 85 Extra

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An independent internal news bulletin
for the members of the Wikimedia community

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=== Policy ===

Most projects of the Wikimedia family, like Wikipedia, Wikibooks,
Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikispecies and Wikiversity, are using the GNU
Free Documentation License.

The GNU Free Documentation License was originally chosen because that
was the available license when the first project, Wikipedia, started.
The GNU FDL is not the most practical licence to use mainly because it
is not designed for what the WMF projects are using it for.

An alternative for the GNU Free Documentation License are the Creative
Commons licenses. Currently the GNU FDL is not compatible with the the
Creative Commons licenses.

The WMF published a resolution declaring that to make them compatible
the Wikimedia Foundation has been working with the Free Software
Foundation and Creative Commons on a solution. The have come to
proposal that would make it possible for the WMF project to migrate to
the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) licence.

The resolution states;

"The Foundation requests that the GNU Free Documentation License be
modified in the fashion proposed by the FSF to allow migration by mass
collaborative projects to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license;

Upon the announcement of that re-licensing, the Foundation will
initiate a process of community discussion and voting before making a
final decision on re-licensing."

So the WMF is asking formally to change the GNU FDL to make a
migration possible and after that there will be a discussion and a
vote about it.

If the projects would migrate to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license
then that means that you are free to share it and to change the work
but you need to give credit to the makers of the work and share the
work under the same or compatible license.

The reason to change to license is that a main objective of the
projects is to create content that can be reused freely by others. The
Creative Commons license would make that more easy to do then the
current GNU Free Documentation License

Jimmy Wales made the announcement of the (possible) move to the
Creative Commons license on a iCommons party in San Francisco.  In his
speech Jimmy said;

"What I'm happy to announce tonight is that just yesterday the
Wikimedia Foundation board voted to approve a deal between the FSF and
CC and Wikimedia. We're going to change the GFDL in such a way that
Wikipedia will be able to become licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike license.

So this is not as some people speculated on facebook my 58 birthday
party … this is the party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia."

This transcript comes from a blogposting with the title "Breaking
news: Wikipedia switches to Creative Commons!".

This not exactly correct. The WMF is on the track of switching but
first the GNU FDL needs to changed officially and the by the board
announced discussions and community vote needs to be taking place.

So the actual move can still be a wile, like single user login or
flagged revisions, if it ever comes.

Discussion about this has started on Foundation-l.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:License_update  -- the
resolution
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/22428 --
Foundation-l discussion
http://blog.jamendo.com/index.php/2007/12/01/breaking-news-wikipedia-switches-to-creative-commons/--
speech Jimmy +
transcript


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