Discussion
"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.
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
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.
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
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