November 13th, 2008
Free Software Foundation does the right thing for free culture
The Free Software Foundation’s latest version of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) surprised me a little — but in a very good way. The FSF has ceded some control and allowed for GFDL content to be re-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. This is a major win for the Wikipedia project and others, and the FSF demonstrates
The problem? Many wikis publish content under the CC license, while Wikipedia uses GFDL. Of course, the licenses were incompatible, which caused a bit of a headache for the Wikipedia project, as Benjamin Mako Hill describes:
There are many reasons for this change but the most important is that the move reduces very real barriers to collaboration between wikis and free culture projects due to license compatibility. BY-SA has become the GPL of the free culture world and Wikimedia wikis were basically locked out from sharing with a larger community, and vice-versa; projects will no longer have to choose between sharing with Wikipedia and sharing with essentially everyone else. The GFDL has done a wonderful job of helping get Wikimedia projects to where they are today and Möller’s proposed switch seems, in my opinion, the best option to continue that work going forward.
So, the FSF decided to make the GDFL 1.3 compatible by allowing relicensing for a limited time (until August 1, 2009). Other organizations and projects with their own licenses might want to take a look at the FSF’s example here when thinking about licensing. It’s not just about the goals of the organization, it’s about the goals of the stakeholders who use the license. As Hill says:
Offering to “let go” of Wikipedia — without question the crown jewel of the free culture world — represents a real relinquishing of a type of political control and power for the FSF. Doing so was not done lightly. But giving communities the choice to increase compatibility and collaboration by switching to a fundamentally similar license was and is, in my opinion, the right thing to do.
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations. Follow Zonker on Twitter.
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