No. 1 Story
ACCC clears Optus to scrap HFC network and use NBN instead
The ACCC has cleared, provisionally, the proposed deal between Optus and NBN Co under which Optus is to be paid around $800m to shut down its HFC network and transfer customers onto the NBN. read moreWikimedia adopts Creative Commons
Stephen Withers
Friday, 22 May 2009 11:49
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"The volunteers who work on Wikimedia projects have very strongly supported making their contributions available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) in addition to the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)," said board chair, Michael Snow. The dual licensing system will mean that in most cases people will be able to choose between the GFDL and CC-BY-SA when reusing Wikimedia content.
The exception will that the GFDL will be dropped from content objects where this is necessary to support remixing it with existing CC-BY-SA content, Wikimedia officials explained.
Lawrence Lessig - the founder of Creative Commons, a free culture activist, and a law professor - said "Richard Stallman's commitment to the cause of free culture has been an inspiration to us all. Assuring the interoperability of free culture is a critical step towards making this freedom work. The Wikipedia community is to be congratulated for its decision, and the Free Software Foundation thanked for its help. I am enormously happy about this decision."
One question left unaddressed is whether the 17,000 or so people that participated in the ballot can be held to speak for everyone that has ever contributed to Wikipedia or one of the other projects.
To those who have ever provided or corrected Wikipedia content: did you even know about the ballot?
At least the two licences have similar intentions. That makes the situation very different from CDDB, where many people contributed to what they thought was a community project to provide automatic track and album naming for CDs, only to have their work appropriated when it turned into the commercial Gracenote operation.
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