GFDL 1.3

Alex Hudson home at alexhudson.com
Tue Nov 4 07:45:57 UTC 2008


Noah Slater wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 10:58:28PM +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:
>   
>> Putting it concisely: on what basis is CC-BY-SA a spiritual successor to the
>> GFDL, other than the technical fact that it has been grand-childed in?
>>     
>
> Perhaps the real question is, is what way is it NOT significantly a successor?
>   

Perhaps I was making an assumption that it was relatively obvious to 
readers when it isn't, so I'll give you the main example I was thinking of.

This GFDL->CC-BY-SA conversion clause is time limited to less than one 
year, so by that point the people who want works under the CC license 
have to get out of Dodge. That doesn't mean that the original work stops 
being available, though, and it might not be the original author who 
actually converted it: after all, the rule is just that it was a GFDL'd 
doc without invariant sections published to a wiki (to simplify).

After that point in 2009, you end up in the crazy [to me] situation that 
an author who has chosen a copylefted license (the FDL) might have had 
their license changed to one which is incompatible with the one they 
chose, without notice to them, and they can't use the modifications that 
other people make to their documentation under that new license.

The whole point of copyleft - to me, anyway - is that other people have 
to publish the changes they make to your work in a manner that you can 
re-use. The fact that a work could be effectively split into two 
separate communities who cannot re-use each other's work seems to me 
pretty antithetical to the spirit of the original license.

Cheers,

Alex.




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