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Wikipedia switches to CC BY-SA 4.0 license

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Re: Wikipedia switches to CC BY-SA 4.0 license

#61

Post by naniwaduni »

Freak_NL wrote: post #31
codetrotter wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s so formulaic, that even ChatGPT will express itself similarly. Me: Write a press release stating that Wikipedia is announcing the update to our license to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 ChatGPT: […] Wikipedia, the world's largest online encyclopedia, is thrilled to announce a significant update to its licensing terms. Effective immediately, Wikipedia will adopt the Creative Commons Attribution-Share…

I like this concept. If what you're trying to communicate is so formulaic and devoid of actual significant content that AI text generators will output nearly the same text: reconsider.

The point of the communication is not to contain actual significant content; it's to declare a fait accompli. Lots of text is like this. Being fresh and exotic isn't the goal.

Re: Wikipedia switches to CC BY-SA 4.0 license

#62

Post by elAhmo »

yankput wrote: post #30

I still love how years ago, Stallman basically added a backdoor to GNU FDL just for wikipedia (and similar wikis) just for the few months when Wikipedia was migrating the license. It worked though to elaborate… wikipedia used to be GNU Free Document License, which is a terrible license. But there was no way to easily migrate to CC, as you would need to contact all the authors and get agreement. So FSF used the “or la…

Maybe I do not understand this fully, but this sounds like effectively bypassing the licence to do something which wasn't originally intended, or what the contributors or authors didn't agree to.

Does this put other licences at risk? What if someone releases something under a licence, and there is a new version that is less or more permissive, allowing the original author's intention to 'vetoed'?

Re: Wikipedia switches to CC BY-SA 4.0 license

#63

Post by Symbiote »

DeathArrow wrote: post #45
Symbiote wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's typical American usage where everything is awesome, amazing or exciting. From my British view, without reference to a dictionary, awesome is when you hear fighter jets zoom overhead, or a metal band from in front of the stage, or Niagara Falls, or a mile-long freight train full of rocks shaking the ground as it passes. The target has strength, size and power. An amazing thing is far beyond normal expectations in…

>It's typical American usage where everything is awesome, amazing or exciting. The British equivalents being "not too bad", "bloody" or "oh".

Government rationing restricts us to one spoken "awesome" per year, using "amazing" twice and "exciting" five times, though children get double until their 13th birthday.

Local government officials, BBC Radio 4 presenters and the nobility often sell or donate their ration to youth workers and minor celebrities.

Re: Wikipedia switches to CC BY-SA 4.0 license

#64

Post by seabass-labrax »

Symbiote wrote: post #39
endisneigh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever consider that it is exciting for someone to have completed this work successfully? Would you also say it’s strange for someone to be excited that they’re done with class, or finished an exam, or successfully closed an old bug? A better question is why everyone has to be so negative.

It's typical American usage where everything is awesome, amazing or exciting. From my British view, without reference to a dictionary, awesome is when you hear fighter jets zoom overhead, or a metal band from in front of the stage, or Niagara Falls, or a mile-long freight train full of rocks shaking the ground as it passes. The target has strength, size and power. An amazing thing is far beyond normal expectations in…

I'm also British, and I found this very exciting. I'm deeply involved in the study and development of FOSS and open culture licensing, and the improvement from CC-BY-SA-3.0 to CC-BY-SA-4.0 can't be overstated.

Roller coaster ride? That's not exciting; that's frightening! I can kind of understand 'getting close to the end of a game with the realization that you might win', but this is more frequently nerve-racking for me.

It's not exclusively an Americanism to be excited about law.

Re: Wikipedia switches to CC BY-SA 4.0 license

#65

Post by noirscape »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #59
noirscape wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much the one time the GNU Project conceded anything to a different organization. Still very strange. Also, for anyone wondering - don't use the GFDL, it's one of the worst written licenses out there. Every copy or snippet of it needs the full license text attached, which is kind of bonkers if all you're doing is a citation. Debian rejects documentation written under the license because it's unclear and onerous…

I'd be interested to know why you imply that the (GNU?) AGPL is a bad licence. AGPL-3.0-or-later is a very sensible FOSS licence in my opinion; some awkward punctuation is about the most I can level against it.

The short of it is that it doesn't do what people think it does. Enforcement of the AGPL is almost exclusively on "please comply" basis rather than the (relatively) battle-tested GPL. It's not "just" the GPL with an extra demand that it also applies on network software, it's much more complex than that.

The AGPL is basically a EULA disguised as a license. It tries to solve the network problem (aka SaaSification, a practice I would argue is against the spirit but very much permissible by the Four Freedoms) in a very "lawyeristic" way. If you don't modify AGPL software, you're not under any obligation to comply with the AGPL in any form. But the moment you touch the code, you now need to make the source available.

This also means it is (theoretically) trivially easy to work around - just contract out your modifications, have the contractor keep the copyright and act as the only user of the software with an indefinite license. You don't have to distribute a thing since you didn't modify the source code, your contractor did.

Going on from that, the AGPL doesn't actually say how compliance with section 13 must be achieved. According to most lawyers I've heard (not that I am one to be clear), basically your only "safe" option for most network apps is to make your code a quine (a program that can reproduce its own source code, most software isn't this, especially not network software) or something like JavaScript that is fully interpreted clientside anyway. Something like a link to a GitHub repository is not compliant with the AGPL.

This specific property also tends to cause major issues when confronted with protocols that don't easily allow for transferring large amounts of text. ie. MIDI is technically a network protocol.

All of those issues come from the fact that what the AGPL wants to do fundamentally conflicts with both freedom 0 (right to run software however you wish) and a more informal FSF stance that EULAs are bad.

It's just a bad license in terms of how it's understood and the text itself is of dubious quality due to how clearly it's written by a lawyer who got asked to say X without saying X.

Also, or-later is generally a bad clause for any license, since it hands over all licensing grants to whatever entity you trusted to write the license in the first place, so unless you wrote it yourself, that's not a good idea.

Re: Wikipedia switches to CC BY-SA 4.0 license

#66

Post by seabass-labrax »

pksadiq wrote: post #32
RicoElectrico wrote: post #3

Why every goddamn thing has to be exciting? Surely American organizational culture is becoming a parody of itself. If anything, this reminds us that American non-profits are run just like corporations.

This specific change shall excite many as CC BY-SA 4.0 is one way GPLv3 compatible, but CC BY-SA 3.0 is not. Which means that free software developers can now embedded many Wikimedia contents in their GPLv3 applications. This seems not mentioned in the blog post though.

Incompatibilities between content and code licences has been a perennial problem for FOSS video games. CC-BY-SA-4.0 is an important step in the right direction!

Re: Wikipedia switches to CC BY-SA 4.0 license

#67

Post by executesorder66 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #28
RicoElectrico wrote: post #3

Why every goddamn thing has to be exciting? Surely American organizational culture is becoming a parody of itself. If anything, this reminds us that American non-profits are run just like corporations.

A change to, say, a non-commercial license would have been very exciting. But yeah, here, it is just a technical update that may be exciting only to specialized lawyers. But we are on a website where we get excited by some tool we never heard about before being rewritten in Rust, so...

Wikimedia specifically avoids non-commercial licenses because it is such a nightmare to define what commercial activity is in a way that everyone can agree on. And the license does not help with figuring that out.

Re: Wikipedia switches to CC BY-SA 4.0 license

#68

Post by seabass-labrax »

yonatan8070 wrote: post #20
RicoElectrico wrote: post #3

Why every goddamn thing has to be exciting? Surely American organizational culture is becoming a parody of itself. If anything, this reminds us that American non-profits are run just like corporations.

"we are very bored today to show you our new license, cc by-sa 4"

"yawn, can we go home yet?" said no lawyer ever

Re: Wikipedia switches to CC BY-SA 4.0 license

#69

Post by madsbuch »

elAhmo wrote: post #62
yankput wrote: post #30

I still love how years ago, Stallman basically added a backdoor to GNU FDL just for wikipedia (and similar wikis) just for the few months when Wikipedia was migrating the license. It worked though to elaborate… wikipedia used to be GNU Free Document License, which is a terrible license. But there was no way to easily migrate to CC, as you would need to contact all the authors and get agreement. So FSF used the “or la…

Maybe I do not understand this fully, but this sounds like effectively bypassing the licence to do something which wasn't originally intended, or what the contributors or authors didn't agree to. Does this put other licences at risk? What if someone releases something under a licence, and there is a new version that is less or more permissive, allowing the original author's intention to 'vetoed'?

It seems like GFDL has an optional declaration that is referred to as the "Or later"-clause. Apparently wikipedia opted for that clause allowing automatic migration of licenses for all content to newer versions of the license.

In collaboration with the organisation behind GFDL, they used that clause to re-license everything under CC.

I think doing something like this is not somethings that should be taken lightly. you are risking the only asset the contract has: trust.

On the other hand: It is good to know, as an author, that you should not accept releasing stuff under a license that has an "or later" clause.

Re: Wikipedia switches to CC BY-SA 4.0 license

#70

Post by 1916 »

yankput wrote: post #30

I still love how years ago, Stallman basically added a backdoor to GNU FDL just for wikipedia (and similar wikis) just for the few months when Wikipedia was migrating the license. It worked though to elaborate… wikipedia used to be GNU Free Document License, which is a terrible license. But there was no way to easily migrate to CC, as you would need to contact all the authors and get agreement. So FSF used the “or la…

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