Creative Commons

The Creative Commons parametric license regime is a more flexible alternative to GFDL.

The Green Documentation License expected to be a Consumerium License may actually fit within the parametric options that the CC license provides. Thus, the GDL would *be* a CC license, but it would not be the GFDL license. Talks are ongoing to dual license most of the GFDL text corpus under something that might end up as a variant of the CC by-sa license, which is the most useful consortium license - requiring attribution and share-alike, with possibly additional terms to deal with moral rights, which the Front-Cover Texts, Back-Cover Texts, Secondary Section and Invariant Sections are supposed to help express (though some claim that they do so imperfectly).

It is also possible that the GDL could simply require certain Invariant Sections and other Secondary Sections and citation in full, which might actually be possible under the GFDL or some future variation of it. By permitting these, the GFDL is in effectively also a parametric license if these capabilities are used in certain ways, especially to reinforce moral rights - such as to add a non-deletable statement that the work is not to be used in some way. Note that most of the GFDL text corpus does not have such moral rights expressions within it, and mediawiki does not support managing them, though nothing prevents other users from picking up texts and adding such terms. Their expressed desires would only apply to their own texts of course.

There are ideologists who oppose even the simple moral rights terms of the GFDL, and will probably destroy the integrity of the GFDL regime in the long term by demanding that everything "be free", meaning, you can change "X is a Nazi" to "X is not a Nazi" and no one who was involved in exposing X as a Nazi can even object. This is, in a word, stupid. But so are many free software aficionados, most of whom don't actually write any useful code.

It's possible that all three licenses (GPL, GFDL, and GDL) will specify terms under which material licensed to one can be released under the others. The Green regime would be the most restrictive, and probably sufficient for Consumerium. If not then the even more restrictive Consumerium Software License could be applied by CGO to our work, or, we could propose a new Creative Commons license to deal with the messy situation above.

See faction license for a proposal to optimize the flexibility of this.

External link

http://creativecommons.org

http://zesty.ca/cc.html - pros and cons