GFDL and CC licenses
I never took much notice of the license issue when we were choosing a license for Appropedia, and I'm starting to see that that was unwise.
The key issue raised with GFDL in the page
Why Wikitravel isn't GFDL
is also relevant to Appropedia: i.e. the need to print out pages of legalese text whenever something from the site is reproduced. Creative Commons is far more flexible. We don't want people to be restricted in how they use our materials. Yes, it will often be ignored anyway, but we don't want to be in the position of inviting contributions under a certain license, then encouraging others to break the terms of that license.
Is it worth changing to CC-by-sa for the sake of this? If so, is it practical to change? Do we have to contact every person who's contributed to this site? (I suspect we can do a good enough job... but I'd like a lawyer's opinion.)
Note, there are some other nice things about CC as well, including the ability to easily search for CC content, (and for Appropedia to show up in such searches) and it seems to be becoming the dominant open content license outside of Wikimedia. However, changing to CC-by-sa wouldn't allow us to use much of the CC content available, especially "nc" (non-commercial) licenses - and there's a lot of nc licensing around, so some of that advantage is illusory.
If moving to CC is an
If moving to CC is an option, then we should look at this soon - possibly encourage as many users as possible (including Joshua's students, while he's still got them in his class) to release their work under a dual license, i.e. both GFDL and CC-by-sa. This would mean we could move to CC-by-sa later with less difficulty, if we choose.
For myself, I will license my own posts under GFDL and CC-by-sa, and will encourage others to do likewise.
One issue: If I copy material to Appropedia under a license that's compatible with Appropedia, but incompatible with the other of the two licenses I am using, is it a matter of noting in the edit summary that this content is under that particular license? (E.g. in the present situation, if I copied GFDL material to Appropedia, but I'm dual licensed... the CC part of the dual license cannot apply to the copied material, so I'm guessing I should make that explicit somehow, any time I do such copying.)
-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
Bigger fan of CC (and having
Bigger fan of CC (and having more flexibility in general).
The possibility of
The possibility of collaboration with Wikitravel might be another reason to go with CC. See my comment on my Wikitravel userpage
and this positive response
(Wikitravel are CC-by-sa 1.0, i.e. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0, for some reason - is that compatible with later CC-by-sa licenses?)
It seems like we're going to have a few sites that we collaborate with (having pages that we both work on, probably using Mako's branch maintenance software quite soon - see
for a related software project). And that won't include Wikipedia, but rather other wikis creating non-encyclopedic content, which are probably more likely to be CC-by-sa.
-- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
I personally prefer the CC
I personally prefer the CC license over GFDL if you want to be able to more easily collaborate with other sites. GFDL is a pain, unless your main goal is to be able to directly copy info in from Wikipedia. As for Wikitravel, they started off as 1.0 and have never upgraded... we've had conversations about it, and basically believe that 1.0 and later versions are compatible, but I don't know a whoooole lot about it.
This looks promising:
This looks promising: Possible license migration sparks debate
"Reports that Wikipedia could migrate to a new content license gained circulation after Jimmy Wales confirmed the progress in that direction at a Creative Commons party... Wales was quoted as calling the event a "party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia."" -- Chriswaterguy (wiki homepage)
Post new comment