Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia

It looks like an issue I’ve been watching closely, due to its ramifications for the LQ Wiki, may be close to a resolution. From a Creative Commons post:

As announced last night by Jimmy Wales (video), the Wikimedia Foundation board has passed a resolution on licensing:

* The Foundation requests that the GNU Free Documentation License be modified in the fashion proposed by the FSF to allow migration by mass collaborative projects to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license;
* Upon the announcement of that relicensing, the Foundation will initiate a process of community discussion and voting before making a final decision on relicensing.

The full resolution can be found here. So far there are 5 approvals and one missing vote. Lawrence Lessig expands on what the announcement means in this post:

As you’ll see in this video, there has been important progress in making Wikipedia compatible with the world of Creative Commons licensed work. But we should be very precise about this extremely good news: As Jimmy announces, the Wikimedia Foundation Board has agreed with a proposal made by the Free Software Foundation that will permit Wikipedia (and other such wikis) to relicense under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

That is very different from saying that Wikipedia has relicensed under a CC license. The decision whether to take advantage of this freedom granted by the FSF when the FSF grants it will be a decision the Wikipedia community will have to make. We are very hopeful that the community will ratify this move to compatible freedoms. And if they do, we are looking forward to an extraordinary celebration.

This is clearly something a lot of people worked very hard on and it’s great to see it finally happen. Kudos to everyone involved. We had been handling GFDL content with a separate namespace at the LQ Wiki, but we’ll work on merging that content into the main namespace now, which as always been licensed CC by-sa.

–jeremy