Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Wikipedia can be re-licensed CC

The Free Software Foundation released of version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License on November 3, 2008. The revision allows public wikis using the GFDL (such as Wikipedia) to relicense their content under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

The move comes at the request of the Wikimedia Foundation, which last year passed a board resolution asking the FSF for the change.

Background: Wikipedia was launched before the Creative Commons licenses existed. Wikipedia adopted an existing license, the GFDL, for its content. But some have argued since then that the CC licenses are a better fit for Wikipedia: for instance, the GFDL has a number of specialized facets related to its history as a license designed for software manuals, which can be confusing in other contexts; the GFDL is only officially maintained in English, and was crafted primarily with an eye to American law, whereas CC has an expansive internationalization effort; etc. Notably, since both the GFDL and CC's BY-SA license have copyleft or "share alike" clauses, content under those licenses can only be mashed and combined with other content under the same license -- so the vast body of content in Wikipedia can't be repurposed for CC-licensed materials, and vice versa.

Wikipedia can't change its own license since it doesn't hold the copyright to its content: each edit is owned by the contributor who made it, who provides only a non-exclusive license to Wikipedia to use it under the GFDL. So to move Wikipedia to a CC license, the GFDL had to be changed to add an exception to its copyleft. The details of the change are that the exception only applies to "public wikis", and only applies until August 2009. It's not a general exception allowing GFDL and CC BY-SA content to be mixed.

Wikimedia now has a window to decide whether to migrate its content to the CC license. Wikimedia's Erik Möller posted an email detailing the process.

See also: