[Licom-l] Document review - motivation for the license change

Wed Mar 18 04:42:34 UTC 2009

Hi everybody, thanks for volunteering for this...

I've reviewed most of the pages.  Main comment:

The "Licensing update" page is short on motivations.  I think it needs a
strong early statement about why we're going to all this bother.  It
currently says just:

  "To achieve greater legal compatibility with existing free
  educational content, and to simplify and clarify the obligations of
  re-users,"

I suggest expanding that to a paragraph or two, along the lines of:

  Many projects [OLPC, ... name a few, I don't know this answer...]
  have had trouble following the current license that we use to
  release Wikipedia pages to the public (the GNU Free Documentation
  License (GFDL).  The GFDL is a copyleft license designed for
  software manuals intended to be printed as books.  The GFDL was the
  best copyleft license for textual material at the time Wikipedia was
  created, and it served us well.  But in discussions with the
  community and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) about the evolution
  of Wikipedia and the license, it became clear that the newer
  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA) seems to
  provide a better fit for massively collaborative projects that are
  generally not formatted as printable books.  The GFDL is relatively
  unknown and unpopular outside Wikipedia, while CC-BY-SA is better
  understood, and is used by millions of existing works -- roughly 18%
  of all Creative Commons works.
  [http://wiki.creativecommons.org/License_statistics]
  [http://hoikoinoi.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/cc-monitor-findings-isummit.pdf]
  Wikimedia worked with Creative Commons and the FSF to build a legal
  path by which existing Wiki pages can be relicensed under both GFDL
  and CC-BY-SA, without going back to every contributor for explicit
  permission.  The existing GFDL already allows relicensing under
  later GFDL versions published by FSF.  They granted us a special
  offer in the latest GFDL-1.3
  [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html], which allows any massive
  multiauthor collaboration site to republish its works under CC-BY-SA
  if it decides to do so before August 1, 2009.  This vote by the
  community is a big part of that decision process, and will inform
  the ultimate decision by the WikiMedia Foundation Trustees.

It's not clear to me whether the text should have a neutral point of
view on whether to change the license, or whether it should advocate
for the change.  The Trustees clearly desired change of some sort,
and this change is what has been worked out so far.  Do we have any
naysayers in the committee, who can seek to represent some common
reasons why people would vote "No"?

	John