GFDL 1.3

[Alex Hudson]

Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
> Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com> writes:
>   
>> I'm not a big fan [...] limiting them by date
>>     
>
> There's flexibility and risk in there in that those works can be relicensed
> to cc-by-sa-3.0 *or* "future copyleft versions of that license".
>   

Well, presumably not much more risk than future versions of the GFDL at 
this rate though.

> But it creates some risks to the freedom of GFDL'd wiki'd works, and it's a
> one-way relicensing that isn't being reciprocated by Creative Commons.  With
> an endless timeline, this would be foolish and even dangerous, but by
> limiting it to a 12 month period, the risk becomes pretty small.
>   

The thing is, that's not really what it is. This clause in the license 
is pretty much specifically there so that Wikipedia can vote on whether 
or not to go CC-BY-SA or not (as a corollary, if they vote no, this 
clause becomes basically a solution in search of a problem).

If the FSF were asked whether or not Debian (for example) could have the 
Emacs manual under CC-BY-SA rather than the GFDL, I suspect they would 
tell them to get lost, or words to that effect. But they don't seem to 
have trouble making that decision for other people who happened to 
publish their work onto a wiki.

Putting it bluntly: playing games like this will make people distrust 
the "or later" clauses. If people choose GFDL, it's pretty bloody 
obvious (to me) that the relaxed CC-BY-SA license isn't what they wanted.

My personal gripe is that I'm stuck with one particular project which is 
on GPLv2 because the developers didn't trust "or later". If significant 
amounts of free software stop trusting "or later", we're going to end up 
with horrendous problems (viz. the GPL compatibility matrix).

FSF have effectively been trusted with the power to relicense large 
numbers of works. Using that power to solve other people's problems 
seems a very slippery slope to me.

Cheers,

Alex.