Change to GFDL

From CRSWiki

Attempt to determine which sort of licence allows the right kind of transmission/copying of info to and from other wikis.

(Note: See "News" item.)

News: The CRS Board Has Ruled

2006.08.25. We will stick with the CC by-nc-sa license. Reasons for this will be given as soon as Board meeting notes are made available.

Proposal

It is proposed that this wiki use the GFDL (described below) to license its content, rather than the CC by-nc-sa license (also described below). Please add any additional arguments as you see fit:

Reasons for

• allows seamless sharing of content from Wikipedia
• allows seamless sharing of content to Wikipedia
• the CC by-nc-sa license is problematic:

- it is intended primarily for complete works, like books or record albums

- it requires a tedius attribution statement, even for snippets that are shorter than the attribution statement itself

- it makes transfer of content to/from wikipedia illegal, even with proper attribution, since the license there is different

• similarly protects us against someone publishing any or all of the site as a commercial book, making money or reputation off of our hard, careful work

Reasons against

• someone could start their own CR wiki, copy all of our content, and try to take over the world of CR from the CR society

GFDL

adapted illegally (under present CRwiki license) from wikipedia:

The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free content, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU project. It is the counterpart to the GNU GPL that gives readers the same rights to copy, redistribute and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies can also be sold commercially, but if produced in larger quantities (greater than 100) then the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient. The license was designed for manuals, textbooks, other reference and instructional materials, and documentation which often accompanies GPL software. However, it can be used for any text-based work, regardless of subject matter. The largest project using the license is Wikipedia, a general-purpose encyclopedia.

Creative Commons licences

adapted illegally (under present CRwiki license) from wikipedia:

The Creative Commons License refers to the name of several copyright licenses released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S. non-profit corporation founded in 2001. These licenses all grant certain baseline rights, such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work on file sharing networks. The rest of the license depends on the version, and is comprised of a selection of four conditions:

• Attribution (by): Permit others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and derivative works based upon it only if they give you credit.

• Noncommercial or NonCommercial (nc): Permit others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and derivative works based upon it only for noncommercial purposes.

• No Derivative Works or NoDerivs (nd): Permit others to copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based upon it.

• ShareAlike (sa): Permit others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. (See also copyleft.)

Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses. Of the five invalid combinations, four include both the "nd" and "sa" clauses, which are mutually exclusive; and one includes none of the clauses, which is equivalent to releasing one's work into the public domain. Five of the eleven valid licenses (the ones that lack the Attribution element) have been phased out because 98% of licensors requested Attribution, but are still available for viewing on the website [1]. There are thus six regularly used licenses:

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Licenses primarily intended for whole works

1. Attribution alone (by)
2. Attribution + Noncommercial (by-nc)
3. Attribution + NoDerivs (by-nd)
4. Attribution + ShareAlike (by-sa)
5. Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)
6. Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike (by-nc-sa)

None of the Creative Commons licenses have been certified by the Open Source Initiative. The Debian GNU/Linux distribution does not believe that it adheres to the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

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Administrivia

• Portions of this section are taken from the Creative Commons website, published under the Creative Commons Attribution License v1.0.