On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 1:39 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Do you think there is something "shameful" about Wikipedia using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License?
And if that isn't shameful, why would it be shameful if Wikidata used the same licence?
There is nothing wrong with BY-SA per se; it's antithetical to the spirit of the free content movement to pick a license for the reason that it would prevent (some types of) reuse, which seemed to be where this conversation was heading. (Just like there is nothing wrong with the GFDL either, but picking it as a Commons image license for the reason that it is technically a free license but onerous enough to prevent reuse in practice would be wrong, IMO.) We have spent enough time to dissuade organizations from publishing content under NC and ND and similar licences because they were afraid of losing control over how it will be used; I'd rather we didn't do that ourselves. ("Shameful" was an unnecessarily confrontational choice of word; I apologize.)
There is also the practical matter of facts not being copyrightable in the US, and non-zero CC licenses not being particularly useful for databases (what you want is something like the GPL Affero for databases and CC does not have such a license).