Re: creative commons vs gfdl

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, 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 went with the CC for a few reasons.  First, it's extremely 
straight forward.  Next, the GFDL is aimed at larger texts (such as 
software manuals and textbooks).  I wanted single articles to be easily 
redistributable.  Under the GFDL you have to distribute the license 
itself, a CHANGELOG and a "source" version for anything you redistribute.  
This could mean 10-20 pages of text for a 2 page article.  With the CC (at 
least with the soon to be released 2.0 version, I still have not gotten a 
straight answer on the 1.0 version) you can simply include a line such as 
"This article is from the LinuxQuestions.org Wiki, is located at 
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Title and is licensed until the CC 
sa-by license".  In short, the license is a little less convenience for 
contributors, but worlds better for users.  The drawback of not being able 
to use GFDL material is unfortunate I agree.  We can try to get approval 
from original authors, which we have gotten in some cases at least, but I 
agree that is not ideal.  If anyone has ideas on how to improve the 
situation let me know.

--jeremy