Re: Relicensing wiki.mozilla.org to CC-BY-SA

On 11.05.2009 16:17 Uhr, Gervase Markham wrote:
> A few years ago, we made the five-year effort to relicense the Mozilla
> codebase under the current tri-license so that our code could be used in
> more contexts and circumstances, without losing copyleft. This has been
> very successful, enabling projects like Songbird and Miro to happen
> which otherwise couldn't due to licensing incompatibilities.
>
> We'd now plan to do another similar, if smaller, thing. The Mozilla
> project, and the world, has been moving towards Creative Commons
> licences for non-code content. This is the licence used by the Mozilla
> Developer Centre and by www.mozilla.org. However, anomalously,
> wiki.mozilla.org is currently under the GNU FDL (Free Documentation
> Licence). This is for no other reason than it was the MediaWiki default
> at the time we set it up, and we inadvertently neglected to change it.
>
> The GNU Project have generously added a relicensing clause to the most
> recent version of the FDL, 1.3, to allow FDL wikis to relicense under
> Creative Commons CC-BY-SA. wiki.mozilla.org is eligible to use this
> exception. We plan to use it to make our wiki content solely CC-BY-SA,
> and so interoperable with MDC, www.mozilla.org and the vast body of
> other Creative Commons-licensed content around the world. We believe
> that this is consistent with contributors' expectations based on their
> experience with other Mozilla sites, and it will simplify moving
> wiki.mozilla.org content to other such sites and remixing it with
> content on those sites.
>
> We want to be sure that people are OK with this, so if you have an
> objection, please post it in mozilla.legal.

I'm sure OK with this, but reading through 
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html, I'm not sure if all our 
material on wikimo actually falls under those terms, or if it just helps 
us to limit the impact of people that we had to ask now? I'm slightly 
confused by the impact of the two dates mentioned.

On an abstract level, GNU here reinforces my "ugh" on their "and future 
versions of this license", as they're passing the license from one group 
(GNU) to another group (CC) by the decision of a third (MMC). And their 
rationale is more like "whatever".

Axel