By Angela Gunn, Betanews
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees on Thursday made official the previously expressed wishes of the user community, passing a resolution that swaps out the project's previous GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) for the Creative Commons Attribution / Share Alike License.
The Creative Commons version -- CC-BY-SA, in that system's nomenclature -- will, according to Wikimedia representatives, allow for greater reuse and legal interoperability with other projects offering the CC-BY-SA, including Yahoo's Flickr service, a variety of archives and libraries, and innumerable independent creative folk. Greater legal compatibility leads to greater reuse opportunities, which leads (the involved groups believe and hope) to further acceptance of the greater-freedom approach (a.k.a., copyleft) to copyright.
The community vote was conducted in late April and early May, with anyone who had registered with a Wikimedia site and contributed 25 or more edits by March 15 eligible to give his opinion. The vote specifically mentioned the CC-BY-SA license, which is the Creative Commons license to which the Free Software Foundation has previously allowed GFDL users to migrate as per GFDL 1.3.
There are no hard feelings about this change on the part of the Free Software Foundation, by the way, or from copyleft pioneer Richard Stallman. In an open letter posted back in December, Stallman noted that "The FSF has been talking with the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Software Freedom Law Center for a year" to plan the license-migration path, and that the FSF has taken pains to make sure that the transition would be fairly and ethically conducted.
Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig was effusive in his praise for the change and for Stallman's contribution to the cause -- heck, he was just generally effusive, for Lawrence Lessig. "Richard Stallman's commitment to the cause of free culture has been an inspiration to us all," he said in a prepared statement. "Assuring the interoperability of free culture is a critical step towards making this freedom work. The Wikipedia community is to be congratulated for its decision, and the Free Software Foundation thanked for its help. I am enormously happy about this decision."
At the time of Wikipedia's 2001 inception, the GNU free Documentation License -- designed originally for software and including restrictions such as requiring the inclusion of a copy of the license text with each copy -- was the leading copyleft option available. Creative Commons was launched in 2002.
Going forward, Wikimedia will continue to support the GFDL, though "not to the detriment of operability" according to Wikimedia officials.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009