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Wikipedia to change licenses
Last November, version 1.3 of the
GNU Free Documentation License gave Wikipedia a special permission to
switch to the Creative Commons attribution-sharealike license license. The
Wikimedia Foundation has now announced the
result of the community's vote on the license change; over 75% (of over
17,000 voters) voted in
favor. So it's now official: Wikimedia's
sites will switch away from the FDL on June 15.
(Log in to post comments)
It's keeping GFDL Posted May 22, 2009 14:26 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] The new licence situation offers both GFDL and CC-by-sa. GFDL isn't being abandoned (with an exception for cases where existing cc-by-sa content is imported into Wikipedia, in those cases those sections will be cc-by-sa-only). IIRC.
Not quite keeping GFDL Posted May 24, 2009 5:03 UTC (Sun) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] GFDL is being abandoned in the sense that existing GFDL-only content is no longer allowed to be imported, whereas existing cc-by-sa-only content is allowed.
Not quite keeping GFDL Posted May 26, 2009 12:34 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
Yes, but that effect will be almost imperceptible. People almost never injected GFDL content into Wikipedia anyway. The case of >99.9% of contributions is original work, so the old situation was GFDL, and the new is GFDL+CC-by-sa (with a cornercase for allowing cc-by-sa-only content). I would have announed "CC-by-sa added as distribution option" rather than announcing that GFDL is being abandoned.
Not quite keeping GFDL Posted May 26, 2009 20:00 UTC (Tue) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] Well, you can count me as one of the people who have transferred GFDL content into Wikipedia. I am involved in PlanetMath, which is a collaboratively developed mathematics encyclopedia licensed under the GFDL. This move by Wikipedia basically requires us to switch to CC-by-sa as well if we want to maintain two-way compatibility. (It's worth mentioning that there are other compelling reasons besides Wikipedia compatibility to switch to CC-by-sa.)
Not quite keeping GFDL Posted May 29, 2009 2:26 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
cc-by-sa does indeed solve real problems. To avoid breaking other compatibility, it would be best to move to the same licence setup as Wikipedia - dual-GFDL+CC-by-sa, rather than just cc-by-sa.
That'll also have the practical advantage of keeping Wikipedia's licence situation clear because cc-by-sa-only stuff, wherever it exists in articles, will have to be somehow marked up as such.
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