[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikinews-l] Licensure straw poll

Thu Sep 1 01:57:27 UTC 2005

Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:

> Dariusz Siedlecki a écrit :
>
>> Still, note this - do we really want to attach 10 pages of GFDL
>> license to our print edition? I think a simple "Licensed under
>> CC-By-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/etc/etc)" would be okay - and
>> this is exactly what a text licensed under CC needs.
>
> Sure, but the CC licenses are not that clear ! Do you now what they 
> mean when they say they are not "revokable" for example. We just 
> talked about it for 2 hours on IRC yesterday.
>
> The CC licenses were not meant to be used precisely for Wikinews and 
> they don't adopt the exact vocabulary we need to describe what we do. 
> We have a chance to make it perfect, so let's do it rather than to 
> rely on third parties legal work.

The one huge problem about rolling your own license is that you can also 
introduce errors into the license that are unintended, or even cause 
unintended problems that might cause heartburn in the future.  The 
advertisement clause in the BSD license is a good example, which is 
viral and can grow incredibly long if done properly.  The fact that the 
GFDL is incompatable with the GPL (you can't use non trivial GFDL'd 
software examples in a GPL'd computer program, for example) is one that 
is really weird, particularly considering the two different licenses are 
written by the same organization.

The usual Free Software Foundation "loophole" on this issue is the "use 
this version of the license or later adopted version".  This is more of 
a cop-out, and something that can cause further legal messes.  It does, 
however, allow the chance that some time in the future a custom license 
could be merged with the GFDL in a much better licensing arrangement, 
provided the GFDL "upgrade" fixes some of the issues that most Wikinews 
users are complaining about with that license.  Or fix the problems that 
may come up when the draft license is issued, from those kinds of things 
listed above.

Using a "standard" license means that the defense of using it will have 
been vetted in legal circles, something that the GPL is currently going 
through with the infamous SCO Linux case.  Defending the license also 
gets popular and legal suport (sometimes) from the people who wrote the 
license.  If we go it alone and write our own license, we don't get that 
sort of protection and instead put the authors and (if approved by the 
board) the Foundation board to stand alone with the license.  On the 
other hand, if it is well written and very clear as well as reasonable, 
it may get adopted by other groups besides Wikinews.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning