This is kind of weird.
- The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hold a vote on whether to distribute Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license, but
- All existing Wikipedia content is licensed under the CC-incompatible GNU Free Documentation License, and
- Getting permission from all the contributors to change the license would be impossible, but
- Most invocations of GNU/FSF licenses (including Wikipedia's) permit distribution under any later version of the given license, so
- The Wikimedia Foundation prevailed upon the Free Software Foundation to release a new version of the FDL specifically giving Wikipedia (and wikipedia-like “Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Sites”) a time-limited option to switch to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.
It's a clever hack. On a practical level it seems justified given it would be impossible to relicense under any other means. On the other hand, I don't really think it's something that anyone would have had in mind when they placed their work under the FDL.
Update: While I still have the same reservations, I can understand where this move is coming from. For quite some time the GNU FDL was the only Copyleft license available that was not specific to software. As such, many people (Wikipedia included) adopted it instead of having to take the trouble to draft their own license.
This move is a recognition on the part of the FSF that the Creative Commons is a more appropriate license for many of these works. This situation is easy enough to resolve for single-author works or works where copyright was more carefully controlled. The new exception gives more complicated projects the opportunity to say “we chose the FDL by default, but if the Creative Commons had existed back then we'd have chosen that instead”.
While it's nice that the FSF is acquiescing to reality, they're still being way too possessive — the wiki-specific clause and the time limit are just asinine.
They should have made it simple — if you don't use the GFDL-specific "features" like invariant sections, you can relicense under CC-AS-3 or later. CC isn't perfect, but at least its pragmatic.
The GFDL is a pretty crappy license, it's whole point was for FOSS projects to be able to make deals with book publishers for the manuals, with all sorts of special cases for things noone cares about anymore. It probably would have been better for Wikimedia to have created a special license at the time, but Jimbo probably would have fucked that up worse.
And that, boys and girls, is why you say "all contributed content is owned by us, not the contributor" instead of "you must license your IP under this particular license that suits us". Because if you get given ownership of the IP, you don't need to find every last contributor in order to make changes, even if 99.9% of the contributors would support you anyway because they never actually cared if the license was CC or FDL or whatever.
While I agree that a CC license would be much better for Wikipedia - purely because it presents itself as a much easier license for the masses to understand - it irks me that the any later version clause is being used in this way.
People distribute their IP under GNU licenses with the any later then clause because they trust the FSF to act in their best interests. They trust that the FSF won't go ahead and later change the license to allow things that will restrict their rights, for example, allow people to redistribute under an Apache style license.
In this instance, it's fine, I don't think any reasonable wikipedia contributor (though there's bound to be some unreasonable person that just wants to make life difficult for everyone else) would object to their content being relicensed under CC. But it sets up a precedent that this can be done in future for other specific causes, and if more things were done like this, I think it would lead to a general mistrust of the FSF.
@James Roper: I'd have to strongly agree with Charles when he said:
"On the other hand, I don't really think it's something that anyone would have had in mind when they placed their work under the FDL."
Try to think about this like you would your own source code: you release it under a license where you sign away your contribution to an organisation that is supposed to protect your IP the way you want it to be protected.
Then from out of the blue: there are political manoeuvrings within that organisation that want to relicense your IP that you have entrusted this organisation with. So they change the definition. But hold on - thats not the deal you signed up for!
INAL, but this could probably stand up in court. The motivation behind community contributions such as wikipedia (or opensource or community gardening) is - feeling good that you have contributed something.
Where does that motivation factor go when you violate that trust? It goes away - and so do the contributions.
I don't know about you but this move by the wikipedia and Jimbo stinks.
I think Wikipedia wants a different license so they can better engage (the foundation and Wikia that is) in business deals and sell the content.
"[...] Jimbo stinks."
In the end, Jimbo got millions of people into this money making scheme. Wonderful! This makes me chuckle and giggle thinking of all my discussions with Wikipedians. Wonderful!
Peace
stephan
That won't work in any case:
"The Free Software Foundation may publish new [licences]. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns"
The key phrase here is "similar in spirit", and an extra clause to give a specific organisation the power to take your work and switch it to an incompatible license is arguably very different in spirit, and would probably leave the FSF and the WMF wide open to litigation from a contributors who does not accept the new licence.
What's more the FSF knows that such a move could severely damage their reputation and it if has any sense, the FSF would reject such an request.
"What's more the FSF knows that such a move could severely damage their reputation and it if has any sense, the FSF would reject such an request."
Except they've already updated the license (see the aforelinked FDL 1.3 FAQ)
Ths s bllsht, I m nt gng t cntrbt t Wkpd vr gn.
Grdy fckng sshls lk Jmmy Wls.
Someone should start another free encyclopedia using all the GNU articles on wikipedia.org
Yeah! I'm gonna start my own encyclopedia! With blackjack! and Hookers! In fact, forget the encyclopedia!