Interoperability between Creative Commons licenses and GFDL

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UPDATE: Relicensing is now possible:

Wikimedia and GFDL 1.3 copyrighteous Mon, 10 Nov 2008

More detail at: GFDL 1.3 Release (Foundation-l posting by Erik Möller):

We are very grateful to the Free Software Foundation for working with us to develop this re-licensing language.

The only change is the addition of section 11, "Relicensing". This section permits "massive multi-author collaboration websites" (i.e. wikis and wiki-like websites) to relicense GFDL content to the CC-BY-SA, under two key constraints:

  • Newly added externally originating GFDL content cannot be relicensed

after November 1, 2008. (In other words, we should stop importing GFDL content from non-Wikimedia sources, unless they plan to switch as well...)

  • The relicensing clause will expire on August 1, 2009.

Relicensing can only be done by the operator of such a website, not by any other party...

  • As a heads up, communities should be more careful with importing

external FDL content, unless they know for sure that it will be migrated to CC-BY-SA in the near future.



Interoperability between CC-by-sa and GFDL has been requested by the Wikimedia Foundation board, which in late November 2007 passed a resolution:

The Foundation requests that the GNU Free Documentation License be modified in the fashion proposed by the FSF to allow migration by mass collaborative projects to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. -- Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia, Mike Linksvayer, Creative Commons blog, December 1st, 2007.

When is this actually happening?

CC-by

CC-by is one-way-compatible with GFDL - meaning that CC-by content can be used in GFDL work, by not vice-versa.

Source: James Grimmelmann, Associate Professor at New York Law School, (Institute for Information Law and Policy). ([cc-licenses] CC-BY=>CC-BY-SA/GFDL, Apr 19, 2007.)

See also [Wikinews-l] The Wikinews Licensure Poll is closed, Sep 2005.

Non-commercial licenses

No NC license can ever be compatible with GFDL.

Footnotes

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