Discussion · bonfire.cafe

@dos @dpk And if you don't know, here's from memory what happened:

Wikipedia was licensed under the GFDL, and that was before CC BY-SA was available as the world's most popular copyleft license for cultural works. How to relicense with so many contributors?

So... Creative Commons, Wikimedia, and the Free Software Foundation collaborated on adding a new version of the GFDL that allowed for relicensing to CC BY-SA if it were done within a short time window to allow Wikipedia to do it

kpcyrd 🏴

@kpcyrd@chaos.social replied · 2 months ago

@cwebber @dos @dpk section 14 contains:

"Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns."

"Later license versions may give you additional or different permissions. However, no additional obligations are imposed on any author or copyright holder as a result of your choosing to follow a later version."

That's not much wiggle room without risking legal uncertainty. 🤷‍♀️ I'm ok with that.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

@cwebber@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

@dos @dpk However, there's another joke in here about the *mutability* of this license choice: what happens if a license is *removed* from the list? By saying "currently" as opposed to "which appeared at any time", it's creating a challenge: it's not an append-only set, it could end up in strange places if something got removed

Sebastian Krzyszkowiak

@dos@social.librem.one replied · 2 months ago

@cwebber @dpk Courts operate not just on the license's letter, but also its spirit, so taking over FSF to publish a permissive GPLv4 wouldn't necessarily be as effective as it may seem at first glance - even if it would still cause plenty of chaos. In contrast, the spirit of this joke license is pretty much "an overly complex way to say it's MIT-0/0BSD" - that is, unless a court decides otherwise, judging from the whole context around a particular case and particular people involved ;)

Christine Lemmer-Webber

@cwebber@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

@dos @dpk Just wait till you find out about how Wikipedia relicensed from the GFDL to CC BY-SA

Sebastian Krzyszkowiak

@dos@social.librem.one replied · 2 months ago

@cwebber @dpk Now tell me, what did the courts say about that when handling lawsuits from copyright holders who were hurt by this? 😉

Christine Lemmer-Webber

@cwebber@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

@dos @dpk And if you don't know, here's from memory what happened:

Wikipedia was licensed under the GFDL, and that was before CC BY-SA was available as the world's most popular copyleft license for cultural works. How to relicense with so many contributors?

Bradley M. Kuhn

@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org replied · 2 months ago

@cwebber

As someone who was present at the drafting of the GFDL, and someone who thinks CC-BY-SA is not actually a #copyleft license, I think Wikipedia picked the correct evil of two lessers.

GFDL was a peace treaty between RMS & Tim O'Reilly written in the form of a license.

CC-BY-SA is copyleft designed by libertarians.

True copyleft must allow reproducibility from first principles. CC-BY-SA doesn't.

Cc: @dos @dpk

Christine Lemmer-Webber

@cwebber@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

@bkuhn @dos @dpk I think copyleft with source-requirement is good, though I'm not convinced it's viable for all places where CC BY-SA is useful for. For example, distributing raw film footage and editing files for some videos isn't really necessary and may be an unnecessary burden if you think about much of the video content out there today, so having a weaker version of "copyleft" is sensible to me. I would be fine with a different term for it though.

1 more replies (not shown)

jack

@jackeric@beige.party replied · 2 months ago

@cwebber @dos @dpk Genevolent For Dictator Life

aeva

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place replied · 2 months ago

@cwebber ahaha that's amazing

Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me replied · 2 months ago

@cwebber @dos @dpk Seems to be true, at least looking at a diff of GFDL-1.2 and GFDL-1.3.

Also funny to read "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site"), reminds me of MMORPG.

Christine Lemmer-Webber

@cwebber@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

@dos @dpk Source: from memory.

But a fun fact about me: before I worked on decentralized network tech stuff (and partly during it), I used to work on the tech team (at one point tech lead) at Creative Commons, and went deep in the weeds on many FOSS / free cultural licensing things

I have much too cursed knowledge about these things because of it

Daphne Preston-Kendal

@dpk@chaos.social replied · 2 months ago

@cwebber @dos It was even more brazen than that: they allowed only *online wikis* to relicense within the time window

Daphne Preston-Kendal

@dpk@chaos.social replied · 2 months ago

@cwebber I recently worked with @n0toose and @gedankenstuecke on reformulating Codeberg’s licence policy to avoid dependency on the FSF or OSI lists with exactly this problem
in mind (considering especially the OSI’s recent bizarro moves in the slop machine space, and I bet when Stallman kicks the bucket the FSF will also start doing some kind of weird shit too)

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