Wikipedia Votes For Creative Commons License
There is a vote underway on wether or not Wikimedia should adapt the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license or not. The reason is that there are some possible issues with the current GNU Free Documentation License, which would be retained as well. Naturally, Creative Commons are thrilled about the prospect:
This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons — until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.
To vote you need to have at least 25 Wikipedia edits before March 15. The vote will be open until May 3, 2009.
Thord Daniel Hedengren is a designer, writer, and blogger, and also the former editor of The Blog Herald. He used to be a hotshot in the gaming industry in Sweden, but sold everything and went International. Most recently he wrote a book called Smashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog, and does loads of kickass design.
I like this idea. The Creative Commons would get such a boost if Wikimedia would move to the CC. Sure, it is mostly psychological (there really isn’t much to do when it comes to moving licenses), but I’m not sure how it will go down with the people who don’t like the CC (yes, these people exist).
It’s worth noting also that Richard M. Stallman, author of the GFDL, also thinks the change is a good idea:
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/2008-12-fdl-open-letter
It is a nice idea anyways…