Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>]

I just thought I'd pop in here with my opinion on this matter.

First, I think that any expectations that the GFDL will be modified to allow derivatives of GFDL works to be licensed under by-sa are probably misguided. The Free Software Foundation created the GFDL for its own purposes and probably is uninterested in changing its license based on the needs of any other party, not excluding Creative Commons and the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm prepared to be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll also note that FSF comments on the Creative Commons licenses have always been dismissive at best.

Second, I think that one-way compatibility is a good idea. For good or ill, there is now a large corpus of work in Wikimedia projects that is available under the GFDL. Although I applaud the efforts of Wikimedia's vast grassroots multi-licensing movement (now that I'm convinced it works), and I wish that the Wikimedia Foundation would consider making its sites use a dual GFDL and by-sa 2.x and above by default where possible, it's only pragmatic to assume that a large percentage of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, in all languages, will remain exclusively GFDL-licensed until their copyright term runs out.

So, in the Creative Commons spirit of generosity and pragmatism, I think it makes sense to share as much work as possible with Wikimedia projects and other GFDL users, even if they can't or won't share back. One-way compatibility is better than no compatibility whatsoever.

Thirdly, I don't think there's much point in having a referendum on the quality of the GFDL. It is in effect just about equivalent to the Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 and above, with the differences being how many and which extraneous bytes each license requires distributors to include.

Finally, I think that the text Mia posted handles the problem effectively. If it was used for the by-sa, I think it would effectuate one-way compatibility quite nicely. I think that using it for by-nc-sa would be unfair to licensors.

~Evan

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Evan Prodromou <evan AT bad.dynu.ca>