Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera AT zmsl.com>]

j lipszyc wrote:
> If comatibility cannot be reached soon CC should advice using GFDL for 
> all educational works (textbooks, manuals, workbooks, dictionaries, 
> encyclopaedias etc.) to keep compatibility with existing resources. Do 
> you agree? This means adding one metatag and one question more on CC 
> main page - and on Science Commons page too.

No, I disagree. No no no no.

* If there is a problem with the GFDL, it doesn't disappear if it's an 
educational work.
* It feels wrong to recommend a less free license to educational work.
* If the GFDL gets more used, that only worsens the problem of not being 
able to share works.
* The GFDL is not as popular for documentation as you suggest.
  - OpenOffice user guide - CC-BY
    http://oooauthors.org

  - Gentoo documentation - CC-BY-SA
    http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml

  - Mozilla documentation - CC-BY-SA
    http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/licensing/website-content.html

  - Drupal handbook - CC-BY-SA
    http://drupal.org/node/14073

  - Wikitravel (part of the WikiMedia project) - CC-BY-SA
    http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page


Notice that the first one is BY instead of BY-SA. We wanted to use BY-SA 
but the OpenOffice rules for posting works on the site required BY.

To my knowledge, the main GFDL work is Wikipedia. And that was an 
unfortunate choice due simply to lack of good alternatives. They chose 
GFDL before CC-BY-SA was around. Let's not make the problem even worse 
by promoting GFDL for a portion of creative works.

Cheers,
Daniel.
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