Re: creative commons vs gfdl

Dan Marshall wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, why is the wiki licensed under the Creative 
> Commons? I'm sure there's a good reason, but it keeps us from using GFDL 
> source material from the wikipedia, LDP, and a lot of man pages. I know 
> that a lot of people are going to think that it's better to do 
> everything from scratch, but not having to reinvent the wheel would save 
> a lot of time.

I'm all for copyleft licenses and I have no problem using the GPL, but 
section (4) alone of the GFDL has 15 clauses. Perhaps it is only so 
popular because the Creative Commons licenses were not available at the 
time (were they?). The Creative Commons ShareAlike-Attribution license 
is much more straightforward to the effect, "Duplicate it, modify it, 
distribute it, just include attribution."

Legal matters are sufficiently inaccessible to the general populace as 
it is (so much so that all or neraly all states have Unlawful Practice 
of Law statutes). Perhaps the significance of the complexity of the GFDL 
is lost on me, but I don't think I would ever use it on one of my own 
projects for just this reason.

Back when this list started, I was reading through the Wikipedia 
commentary and discussion of how the GFDL applies to their own case, and 
my impression was that even they didn't fully understand its 
application. They seem in some respects to have just gone along with it 
and optimistically assumed that it meant what they hoped it did.

dircha