Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
Alex Hudson home@alexhudson.com writes:
I'm not a big fan [...] limiting them by date
There's flexibility and risk in there in that those works can be relicensed to cc-by-sa-3.0 *or* "future copyleft versions of that license".
Well, presumably not much more risk than future versions of the GFDL at this rate though.
But it creates some risks to the freedom of GFDL'd wiki'd works, and it's a one-way relicensing that isn't being reciprocated by Creative Commons. With an endless timeline, this would be foolish and even dangerous, but by limiting it to a 12 month period, the risk becomes pretty small.
The thing is, that's not really what it is. This clause in the license is pretty much specifically there so that Wikipedia can vote on whether or not to go CC-BY-SA or not (as a corollary, if they vote no, this clause becomes basically a solution in search of a problem).
If the FSF were asked whether or not Debian (for example) could have the Emacs manual under CC-BY-SA rather than the GFDL, I suspect they would tell them to get lost, or words to that effect. But they don't seem to have trouble making that decision for other people who happened to publish their work onto a wiki.
Putting it bluntly: playing games like this will make people distrust the "or later" clauses. If people choose GFDL, it's pretty bloody obvious (to me) that the relaxed CC-BY-SA license isn't what they wanted.
My personal gripe is that I'm stuck with one particular project which is on GPLv2 because the developers didn't trust "or later". If significant amounts of free software stop trusting "or later", we're going to end up with horrendous problems (viz. the GPL compatibility matrix).
FSF have effectively been trusted with the power to relicense large numbers of works. Using that power to solve other people's problems seems a very slippery slope to me.
Cheers,
Alex.