The CC-BY-SA license was certainly available -- it's one of the core CC
licenses, and has been since the start.

The main reason Wikipedia had changes is, I believe, that the GFDL is simply
a bad license for a wiki: the GFDL requires individual authors to be listed,
and has other restrictions that make content reuse a bit cumbersome.
Secondarily, there was the incompatibility with various other copyleft
sources that are using the CC-BY-SA type licenses.

Now, Wikinews is not using a copyleft license: CC-BY is _less_ restrictive
than CC-BY-SA, and was chosen to be so on purpose. Our license allows much
easier reuse of our content by commercial and non-commercial sources, with
or without changes, as long as it's attributed back to us. The CC-BY-SA
license, however, requires that if any changes are made in downstream reuse
of content, the changed content is made available under a similar license.
This, by definition, is more restrictive than just a plain attribution
requirement. And this is the reason why Wikipedia content can't be copied to
Wikinews: we are not able to offer the guarantee that downstream reuse of
Wikinews content will follow CC-BY-SA.

You can see the original discussion / voting at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/License

-ilya

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Brian McNeil
<[email protected]>wrote:

> Commons is the most compelling project to be compatible with. If you
> actually look into the details of CC-BY-SA it is the license Wikinews would
> probably have chosen were it available at the time. CC-BY-SA makes
> Wikipedia
> content vastly more useful to a lot of places and clears up significant
> potential fair use issues quoting content on non-CC-BY-SA sites.
>
> Remember, Wikipedia ended up GFDL as a historical accident. They've worked
> from that - including strongarming 'The Bearded One' - into writing a
> get-out-of-GFDL clause. CC-BY-SA is *currently* the best choice for the WMF
> mission. I don't think it was available when Wikinews went from PD to
> CC-BY.
>
>
> Brian.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jason
> Safoutin
> Sent: 30 May 2009 16:26
> To: Wikinews mailing list
> Subject: Re: [Wikinews-l] Wikipedia's 'In the news'
>
> Why though? Then what purpose does it serve to have changed WP to
> CC-BY-SA if it still prevents  copying from WP to WN or the likes? In
> that sense, it really makes no logical sense. I thought the goal was to
> make the WP license more compatible with other project licenses? If so
> then changing it to CC-BY-SA isn't doing that at all (aside from commons).
>
> --
> Jason Safoutin
> Wikinews accredited reporter and administrator
> [email protected]
>
>
>
> Paul Williams wrote:
> > 2009/5/30 Jason Safoutin <[email protected]
> > <mailto:[email protected]>>
> >
> >     Why could we not copy from WP? SA is just the basic same as regular
> CC
> >     BY. If copying from WP will still not be allowed, then why did they
> go
> >     through the trouble to even change the license if its still not
> >     compatible with other projects?
> >
> >
> > CC-BY is not the same as CC-BY-SA - we (Wikinews) must publish our
> > content under CC-BY-SA if we wish to copy from WP.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Paul Williams
> > [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikinews-l mailing list
> > [email protected]
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Jason Safoutin
> Wikinews accredited reporter and administrator
> [email protected]
>
>
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