On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 1:39 AM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)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).