discuss: Thread: LWN article: Wikipedia transition from GFDL to CC BY-SA

Those of you who are Linux Weekly News subscribers, please see:
http://lwn.net/Articles/305892/

  GFDL 1.3: Wikipedia's exit permit
  by Jonathan Corbet
  November 5, 2008

  [...]
  Members of the Wikipedia project have wanted to move away from the GFDL
  for some time.  [...]  The presence of the "or any later version"
  language allows Wikipedia content to be distributed under the terms of
  later versions of the GFDL with no need to seek permission from
  individual contributors. Surprisingly, the Wikimedia Foundation has
  managed to get the Free Software Foundation to cooperate in the use of
  the "or any later version" permission to carry out an interesting legal
  hack.
  [...]

  In other words, GFDL-licensed sites like Wikipedia have a special,
  nine-month window in which they can relicense their content to the
  Creative Commons attribution-sharealike license. This works because (1)
  moving to version 1.3 of the license is allowed under the "or any later
  version" terms, and (2) relicensing to CC-BY-SA is allowed by GFDL 1.3.

LWN articles become available to the general public after eight days, so
non-subscribers will be able to read the story starting Nov. 13.