Derik in Minnesota

06:50 pm - 19 days, 351 Words and Patient Zero

When the Transformers Wiki was deciding to relicense its content under the Creative Commons, we spent a lot of time discussing it. I mean—an insane amount of time. The GFDL’s relicensing option offered a single up-or-down choice; stay with GFDL or switch to Creative Commons. Why bother?

Well, because the community is concerned about potential problems our license might cause for Hasbro. CC-BY-SA is not a ‘play license,’ it’s court-tested and carries significant consequences.
The question that we kept coming back to: So what if some official Transformers publication re-uses a portion of our content? Of course, what are the odds of that happening?

10:45 pm - The Bastards of Free Culture

I’m a Transformers fan. For the last few years I’ve been active on the Transformers Wiki. And the TFWiki is currently debating whether or not to migrate our site-wide licensing from GFDL to CC-BY-SA3. Essentially a platform change in our site’s underlying “legalese” from Linux to Mac.

Sounds boring, right?

The complete meltdown of Western Civilization, after the cut.