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back to article Wikipedia lets Creative Commons into its heart

Yes, Wikipedia is moving to a Creative Commons license. After a vote by its Board of Trustees and its community at large, the Wikimedia Foundation has announced that its projects will move their primary licensing from the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA). …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good

    CC is slightly less idiotic than GPL, but it's rather insulting how they say "CC-SA-BY means you can do XYZ, provided ABC" and then tack on a disclaimer that says "... no actually it doesn't, what we just said doesn't mean anything and if you want to know what CC-SA-BY really means you have to read 12 pages of lawyerese."

    Bah! I have no respect for licenses or people who write them.

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  2. Flocke Kroes Silver badge

    AC: 01:29

    The only reason you can use proprietary or free/open source software is that you have a license. If you do not respect the license, you lack the authority to use the software. That restricts you to software that has passed into the public domain. What OS and applications do you use?

    Commercial software exists because the authors are financed by license sales. BSD licensed software exists because the authors use the attributions required by the license to justify educational grants. Free/open source software exists because some programmers like the requirement that if someone else distributes modified versions of their software, the modifications have to be made available for anyone to use.

    Almost all software exists because of copyright law and licenses. I have a great deal of respect for the people who created licenses. Because of them, I am able to earn a living, use some excellent software, read interesting books, watch films and listen to music without requiring musicians to be present.

    Get a clue you freetard.

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  3. Tom

    All rubbish

    Licenses are written by people with a vested interest in keeping the legal system complex, it keeps them in jobs, if licenses were written in a more logical simple to understand way then there would be a lot less cause to ever seek legal advice in relation to them.

    The whole system needs to change, we pay a whole profession to provide understanding to things they themselves make complicated.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    What's the difference?

    All these free licenses, they all seem the same to me.

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  5. Dave
    Flame

    @Flocke Kroes

    At the risk of starting a flame-war, saying that Open Source Licensing is a large minefield shouldn't be particularly controversial. I think most people agree that Closed-Source Licensing is quite a large minefield as well, and so I would not take the AC comment at any kind of attack against the software itself, more a comment on the current legal system.

    But since you appear to be an expert, perhaps you could explain, in simple terms, what the difference is between a commercial website and a non-commercial one, since that is one of the most common differentiators between open-source licences.

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