Policy:Copyrights/Update

DareNET has chosen to exercise its option under Version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License to re-license the DareNET Wiki as Massive Multiauthor Collaborations under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, effective January 1, 2009. This will affect all text and rich media (images, sound, video, etc.) currently licensed under "GFDL 1.2 or later versions". This change is meant to advance the DareNET Wiki's mission by increasing the compatibility and availability of free content.

Motivation for change

The core motivations behind this change are as follows:

Without the change, we could not share text with projects that use the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike Licenses. The Creative Commons licenses are used by hundreds of thousands of authors world-wide, having quickly become the most widely used legal tool to release rights on works other than software. This interoperability barrier with other organizations and online communities who share knowledge freely is therefore counter to our Wiki's mission.

The GFDL includes some potentially onerous provisions, such as the requirement to include the full license text with each copy. These requirements impede re-use of both text and multimedia (spoken or printed versions of articles, prints of images, etc.). The DareNET Wiki is committed to the widest possible dissemination of free knowledge. While our terms of use have always allowed for lower barriers to re-use, their inconsistency with the license text leads to fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what is legal and what is not. It advantages those re-users who can afford legal advice and research over those who cannot.

What the change achieves

Makes all content currently distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License (with "later version" clause) additionally available under CC-BY-SA 3.0, as explicitly allowed through the latest version of the GFDL.

Requires continued dual-licensing of new community edits in this manner, but allow CC-BY-SA-only content from third parties. However, GFDL-only content from third parties is no longer allowed.