Vote on Wikimedia licensing update underway
April 14th, 2009

One of the core principles under which Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia Foundation projects operate is that the knowledge contributed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers shouldn’t be locked into our servers. People should be able to re-use and re-purpose it in countless useful ways, commercial or non-commercial, to ensure that our work reaches the largest possible number of people. And from online mirrors to DVD editions to printed books to mobile versions, this basic principle has allowed knowledge to flow freely across all media.

When authors don’t make an explicit licensing choice, this isn’t possible: as an author, copyright law gives you maximal “protection”, unless you grant usage rights to others. Because the Wikimedia projects are an open collaboration, this grant of rights is requested from all contributors: When you make an edit to Wikipedia or most of our other projects, you’re asked to release it under a license that gives others, essentially, the right to use it for any purpose, as long as they provide credit to the authors and make any improvements freely available.

There are standard licensing documents that enumerate the rights and obligations of re-users. When Wikipedia started in January 2001, the project chose the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) developed for freely usable software documentation. The idea of giving information other than software freely away in this fashion was still relatively novel at the time, and so it made sense to adopt a license that had been developed by the free software community, which at the time could already look back on a long tradition of sharing cultural works freely.

However, because it was developed specifically for (typically printed) documentation, the GFDL contains many passages that aren’t relevant to an online work like Wikipedia, and it also contains obligations that, when taken literally, are quite onerous. For example, it requires that the full text of the license accompany every copy of the work, and it also requires that the section entitled “history” be included with each copy. (For Wikipedia, a massively edited work, this history of changes is often much larger than the work itself.) While Wikipedia has developed a long practice of interpreting this language to facilitate easy re-use, the literal text of the license has baffled many re-users and confused them about what they can and cannot do.

In 2002, a newly formed non-profit organization called Creative Commons released a set of standardized licensing agreements to flexibly grant rights to re-users (the right to make copies, the right to commercial use, the right to distribute modified versions of a document, etc.). These licensing agreements have found rapid adoption by a growing community of authors. For example, the popular photo-sharing site Flickr integrated the option to choose one of the Creative Commons licenses directly into its uploading interface, and thousands of users have granted more permissive rights to re-users than standard copyright would give. Last month, Flickr celebrated that more than 100 million photos had been uploaded under one of the CC licenses.

Importantly, some of the CC licenses are significantly more restrictive than what Wikimedia permits: unlike Wikimedia, they restrict commercial re-use, or limit the creation of derivatives. (In the case of a photo, that would include embedding the photo into a video sequence, for example.) One license, however, is very similar to the GNU Free Documentation License in its fundamental spirit and intent: the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

Unlike the GFDL, CC-BY-SA allows simply referencing the license text instead of including it with each copy, and it does not require copying an entire history of changes with each document. And, it’s not a license written for software documentation, but for any kind of work. Moreover, it’s been specifically adapted to many international jurisdictions, and there are official translations in many languages. A more detailed comparison is available.

Because many people consider it more suitable for works other than software documentation than the GFDL, it’s also been widely adopted. Projects like WikiEducator, Citizendium, the Encyclopedia of Earth, the Encyclopedia of Life, and many others use CC-BY-SA as a content license. While GFDL and CC-BY-SA are very similar, text under one license cannot be integrated into text under another. This incompatibility barrier has presented a growing problem: As other communities have started to share knowledge freely, Wikimedia has lacked interoperability to be able to take from them, and give to them.

As early as 2004, first discussions began about harmonizing the Wikimedia license. Last year, the Free Software Foundation released a new version of the GFDL, 1.3, which specifically allows massively collaborative websites like the Wikimedia projects to also license content under CC-BY-SA. This option was developed by the Free Software Foundation in answer to a request by the Wikimedia Foundation. The request included a commitment by the Wikimedia Foundation to consult its community of volunteers before actually implementing any change.

After months of open discussion and development of the specific licensing terms under which Wikimedia content will be available, the Wikimedia community is now encouraged to vote on a proposal for updating the Wikimedia Foundation licensing terms on projects which currently use the GFDL. Rather than eliminating the GFDL entirely, the proposal will retain it where possible, while also making content available under CC-BY-SA and allowing it to be imported. If the proposal is implemented, licensing terms on all projects in all languages will be standardized where the GFDL is currently use. This standardization will also create clear and understandable terms and conditions for re-users who want to remix information from our projects.

In order to vote, users who have made more than 25 edits prior to March 15, 2009 on any Wikimedia project can visit a special page which will transfer them to a third party server (the page is linked from a notice on top of all pages for logged in users). The server is administered by Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) to guarantee the integrity of the vote. The vote will be tallied by a licensing committee made of Wikimedia volunteers. It will be concluded by May 3, 2009. After the vote result is published, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation will consult regarding the outcome of the vote and next steps.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has published a clear position statement: “The Board has evaluated possible licensing options for Wikimedia material, and believes that this proposal is the best available path towards achieving our collective goal to collect, develop and disseminate educational material, and make it available to people everywhere, free of charge, in perpetuity.”

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

I'm still reflecting as what the best course of action for me personally concerning this might be, however I must say that I will not simply accept that my personal edits are simply "switched over" to this new license without having any say in that (since I'm "community banned"). I'm considering writing Mike Godwin and asking that all of my edits be deleted from the servers, which would probably be the only way to resolve this properly for me.

Thoughts?

This is weird. Are they really allowed to change the license of something someone has written on the basis that a majority of a community of gibbering idiots says so? "Sorry, I know you licensed this under GFDL, but we have a large group of 14-16 year olds and unemployed mental cases who think it should be Creative Commons. Sucks to be you "

I don't really care one way or the other about my own edits, but I would be muchly entertained if someone kicked up a big fuss over this.

Are they proposing altering the license going forward for material newly added after a date certain or actual suggesting that they might retrospectively alter the terms of the license granted by thousands of atomized contributors through a vote?

After months of open discussion and development of the specific licensing terms under which Wikimedia content will be available, the Wikimedia community is now encouraged to vote on a proposal for updating the Wikimedia Foundation licensing terms on projects which currently use the GFDL. Rather than eliminating the GFDL entirely, the proposal will retain it where possible, while also making content available under CC-BY-SA and allowing it to be imported. If the proposal is implemented, licensing terms on all projects in all languages will be standardized where the GFDL is currently use. This standardization will also create clear and understandable terms and conditions for re-users who want to remix information from our projects.

10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE

The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the GNU Free Documentation License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/.

Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number. If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this License "or any later version" applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the Document specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of this License can be used, that proxy's public statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Document.

V 1.3

10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE

The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the GNU Free Documentation License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/.

Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number. If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this License "or any later version" applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation.

V 1.1

10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE

The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the GNU Free Documentation License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/.

Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number. If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this License "or any later version" applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation.

I don't see how this could be done legally, but I'm not a lawyer. This is what I understand, but maybe there's something that I'm missing here.

WMF does not specify a version number. Presumably they don't use use this provision because they can't get Stallman to cooperate with their needs?

Clause 10


Clause 10 introduces another change introduced in the GPLv3, that a licensor may appoint a proxy to determine whether the licensed work can be relicensed. This is important because generally, only the copyright owner may change the licence. By appointing a single proxy (or a small number of proxies), members of a community can ensure that their code or text is able to be relicensed under future versions but does not automatically version up - a protection against potential tyrranical practices by the FSF.

If the Document specifies that a proxy can decide which future versions of this License can be used, that proxy's public statement of acceptance of a version permanently authorizes you to choose that version for the Document.

Clause 11


Clause 11 is the important one for Wikipedia. This is the clause which allows one-way relicensing under CC BY-SA 3.0. It is limited in a number of ways:

1.
Only applies to a “Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site”, which must be a web “server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works” - a wiki is given as an example of such a site. I'm guessing that the word 'anybody' here is not meant to be absolute, but it seems a bit ambiguous. Some people, after all, are banned or cannot access wikipedia.
2.
Only applies to CC BY-SA 3.0. Importantly, 3.0 SA has it's own version up clause and allows relicensing under the various jurisdiction licences.
3.
Does not apply to any works which use invariant sections or cover texts (apparently, unless those invariant sections or cover texts were imposed by the wiki ('MMC Site') originally - not much of a distinction, wikipedia doesn't use invariant sections or cover texts).
4.
Only applies to works which are incorporated into the wiki prior to 01 November 2008. This restriction means that one cannot take a software manual licensed under the GFDL and post it on a public wiki and then relicense it under CC BY-SA. It is said to prevent 'gaming' of the system. This time limit only applies to works first published elsewhere and then incorporated on the wiki. There is no restriction for works which are first published on the wiki that wishes to relicence. This means that for wikipedia, there should now be an effective freeze on new additions of GFDL material which has been published elsewhere. New edits under the GFDL will still be able to be relicensed, but edits sourced from elsewhere will not.
5.
Only the 'operator' may relicense. No dice if we want to take a DB dump of wikipedia and release ourselves. Interestingly, a wiki that forked before 01 November 2008 should be able to relicense regardless of whether wikipedia does; new forks may not relicense.
6.
the 'operator' must relicense before 01 August 2009. The option will not be available after that.

“Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site” (or “MMC Site”) means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A “Massive Multiauthor Collaboration” (or “MMC”) contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.
“CC-BY-SA” means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco, California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.
“Incorporate” means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.
An MMC is “eligible for relicensing” if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.
The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.

Section 11 would seem to be meant to apply wikis but it is incredibly opaque. Moeller says something about an election as part of the deal. But this does not appear in the document. But how does an election replace a series of individual grants? Because Stallman says so?

Imagine the bad judgment it would take to select a license that would permit GNU, the drafter of document, to make decisions about future changes? They have in effect made Stallman a party to each grant under the license.

WMF does not specify a version number.

I have no idea whether this would hold up, but I assume that actual I.P. lawyers were involved in this process, so I'm going to go with "yes".

The Wikipedia page that details the license has no mention of a version (unless it is in some unexpected section). But I think you misunderstood the effect of the lack of the expressed version number. Under Section 10 not stating the version number serves to open the door to subsequent changes. This makes the V 1.3 changes possible to incorporate. So we are actually agreeing on that point.

This is weird. Are they really allowed to change the license of something someone has written on the basis that a majority of a community of gibbering idiots says so?

I think the process assumes good faith.

The note under the edit window says that you agree to release it under the "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts." Since, as you say, GFDL 1.3 allows for this change, the theory would be that people who have added content to Wikipedia have agreed to this by licensing their content under any post-1.2 version of the GFDL.

It would appear that people would be able to take something in GFDL, change it or simply copy it and then call it CC-BY-SA.

Moeller says something about an election as part of the deal. But this does not appear in the document.

As for the implications, as I understand it the implications are that Wikipedia finally moves to a viable license, as distinct from the GFDL, which is more or less impossible to comply with in a wiki (and nobody really seems to know what would constitute compliance anyway).

Sorry, you are not in the predetermined list of users authorised to vote in this election.

Luke, Brad, Flo, care to explain? Better be good.

I don't know what this is about. The election is run from Meta, and I am only really active on English Wikipedia. (En-WP ArbCom has no jurisdiction over Meta.) Can I take it that you logged in from an account that had the required number of edits by the cut-off date?

The criteria is "users who have made more than 25 edits prior to March 15, 2009 on any Wikimedia project"; I have 118,415 edits on en-wiki so I assume I qualify…

The criteria is "users who have made more than 25 edits prior to March 15, 2009 on any Wikimedia project"; I have 118,415 edits on en-wiki so I assume I qualify…

I think the actual change is all for the good; the GFDL is a lousy license for things other than the narrow class of technical documentation it was devised for; the CC licenses are much better. The sneaky way the license change must be accomplished, taking advantage of a loophole in the old license permitting upgrades to newer versions of the license, combined with a contrived change in the newest GFDL license carefully crafted by the GNU people to permit a narrow window of opportunity for Wikipedia (and a handful of other projects in similar circumstances) to change the license, is problematic in the abstract, given that it would make it possible, should the GNU project decide for some weird reason to allow it, for a future version of the license to impose oppressive terms on all licensees ("Effective with GFDL 666.666, all creators of GFDL licensed works must sacrifice their first-born sons to the Gods of Open Sourcedom!").

Pretty much agree. CC BY SA is much better than GFDL. This is a negotiated escape from GFDL which is just plan weird and designed for software documentation not a project where the content of the "document" was the primary object of the collaborative project. As usual the process is a sham and pretext. A project the scope of WP should have seen this coming in at the start, even if that predates CC.

The simple summary was that GDFL had a special new version invented with a time limited clause to allow Wikipedia to change licence. I seem to recall that was discussed back in November last year (being too lazy to check the discussion from back then...). As the GDFL licence is that you grant the GDFL licence the licence to be changed to any old new version in the future, this seems to be in line with the licence tht Wikipedia operates under.

The problem is that this "simple summary" which has been floating around is inaccurate, and no full explanation has ever been given.

The change is improper and illegal, and is being justified (even explicitly in this thread by dtobias, GBG, and One) simply on the basis that "the ends justify the means".

FTA: Could you elaborate on how changing the licensing to CC BY SA would upset your expectations? I completely agree in principal that changing licensing in mid-stream is wrong but it becomes stronger when you can actually see the harm.

It just doesn't work that way in the real world. I don't see how it can work this way on the web …

Cartoon Physics can work any way the cartoonist desires.

It upsets my expectations because I released my contributions under a specific license. Changing the actual license is not possible under the version of the license that I actually signed. Pretending that this is only an administrative detail (regardless of how much better the CC BY SA license is for WMF use, which is not under debate here) is a dishonest "slight of hand" move that leaves an extremely bad taste in my mouth.

This is as if I went back to all of my composers and said that because they had already signed one contract with me that they had de facto signed another contract which gave me other rights than those specified in the original contract. It just doesn't work that way in the real world. I don't see how it can work this way on the web...

Not quite. I have indicated that I doubt the appropriateness of changing licenses in mid stream. It is just that it is very hard to find anything good to say about GFDL, beyond the virtue of dancing with the one that brought you. Section 10 of the GFDL has always given a means of changes the terms. The new Section 11 in GFDL 1.3 if simply unintelligible but "people say" say that it permits adoption of CC BY SA. This election (by "election" this I mean "vote" not "asserting a choice") is just a something made up to justify a mass collective exercise of what otherwise would amount to a series of millions of individual licencing grants.

But what nobody has explained to me is how switching from GFDL to CC BY SA would adversely impact them. I'm not says it can't be the case, but nothing comes to mind.

It would prevent existing GFDL material from being imported. It might not even allow existing CC-BY-SA material to be imported (something about incompatible attribution requirements i keep hearing)

I got the impression at some point that it seems to be what Wikia wants to happen, which makes the whole thing suspicious

The change is improper and illegal, and is being justified (even explicitly in this thread by dtobias, GBG, and One) simply on the basis that "the ends justify the means".

The criteria is "users who have made more than 25 edits prior to March 15, 2009 on any Wikimedia project"; I have 118,415 edits on en-wiki so I assume I qualify…

(adding) Hmmm, just let me vote by following the link from Commons instead of en-wiki. Maybe just a glitch.

That said, I find it strange that negotiations with non-authors could allow the license to be changed this way. I doubt anyone would protest, ... but it seems peculiar that licenses could be legally revised by such a process.

I presume that once the change is carried out, some enterprising individual (who knows, perhaps even me) will serve WMF with a DMCA take-down notice for their previous contributions, and we'll get to see how they react. Regardless of the improvement the CC license may be, WMF cannot unilaterally change the copyright status of previous contributions.

Better grab it all now (!)

I presume that once the change is carried out, some enterprising individual (who knows, perhaps even me) will serve WMF with a DMCA take-down notice for their previous contributions, and we'll get to see how they react. Regardless of the improvement the CC license may be, WMF cannot unilaterally change the copyright status of previous contributions.

It's already too late - the deadline for importing GFDL content from other sources was November 2008. (without a single vote cast! Hmm, I wonder...)

11. RELICENSING

"Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.

"CC-BY-SA" means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco, California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.

"Incorporate" means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.

An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.

The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.

It's already too late - the deadline for importing GFDL content from other sources was November 2008. (without a single vote cast! Hmm, I wonder...)

Q. Exactly what material can be licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0?

A. In order to license an FDL-covered work under CC-BY-SA 3.0, a few conditions must be met:
*The work must be available under the terms of FDL 1.3, which provides you with this permission. If the work was released under the terms of “the GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.2 or (at your option) any later version,” then it meets this criteria.
*The work must not have any “Cover Texts” or “Invariant Sections.” These are optional features in all versions of the FDL.
*If the work was originally published somewhere other than a public wiki, it must have been added to a wiki (or some other kind of web site where the general public could review and edit the materials) before November 1, 2008.

All FDL-covered material added to Wikipedia before November 1, 2008 satisfies these conditions.