[Textbook-l] wikiversity licensing

Sat Aug 23 13:02:30 UTC 2003

Jimmy Wales wrote in part:

>In
>http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200305/msg00582.html
>RMS wrote,

>>Incompatibility of licenses is a significant practical inconvenience,
>>and we have sometimes made changes for the sake of compatibility, but
>>mere inconvenience doesn't make a license non-free.

To provide context, this discussion is about incompatibility
between the various GNU licences (FDL and GPL).
Of course, we don't have to mention that when we quote it back to him and say
«Isn't intercompatibility with non-GNU copyleft licences a good idea?». ^_^

>As far as I'm concerned *our* beef with the GNU FDL is not about
>invariant sections per se, but about license incompatibility.  We'd
>like for people to be able to cut and paste text back and forth with
>relative easy from documents under GNU FDL and CC Attribution-Share
>Alike.

Agreed.  I don't like the IS (and related) features of the GNU FDL,
but they're not the big deal.

>What might work out for everyone would be the creation of an 'LFDL',
>for "Lesser FDL", similar in spirit and motivation to the "LGPL".  And
>Stallman can recommend that people not use it, while simulteneously
>acknowledging that it can be useful in some contexts.

I like this idea, and your reasons for it.  Now who can sell it to RMS?
Of course, we need GNU -- we can't just write it ourselves -- for this reason:

>Anything released under FDL 1.x or 2.0 with no invariant sections, no
>Front-Cover texts, and no Back-Cover texts can be distributed under
>the terms of LFDL 2.0 *or* FDL 2.0.  Anything release under FDL 1.x
>with invariant sections can be released under FDL 2.0.

I can't say that I've read anything from RMS
suggesting that he would never agree to this.
I don't suppose that he'll like it at first, but we do have our reasons.
It's not like he's an obstinate, stubborn ideologue --
rather a thoughtful, open-minded ideologue. ^_^

>A similar change would need to be made to CC SA 2.0, so that it would
>allow for relicensing under LFDL.

I really don't know anything about CC's Lawrence Lessig.
Given the internecine political battles between "free" and "open",
does anybody know how RMS and Lessig feel about each other?
(I mean in particular «I trust this organisation to do good licences,
at least to whatever degree is necessary for the LFDL to work in the end.».)
I know that Lessig wrote the foreword to RMS's collected essays;
but OTOH, Lessig says "open" rather than "free" now.

-- Toby