At the request of the Wikimedia Foundation, the Free Software Foundation has modified the GNU Free Document License so that, in the newly released version 1.3 of that license, the Wikipedia, which uses the GNU FDL License, can use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
In "Enormously Important News from the Free Software Foundation," Lawrence Lessig discusses the significance of this change.
Here's an excerpt:
It would be hard to overstate the importance of this change to the Free Culture community. A fundamental flaw in the Free Culture Movement to date is that its most important element—Wikipedia—is licensed in a way that makes it incompatible with an enormous range of other content in the Free Culture Movement. One solution to this, of course, would be for everything to move to the FDL. But that license was crafted initially for manuals, and there were a number of technical reasons why it would not work well (and in some cases, at all) for certain important kinds of culture.
This change would now permit interoperability among Free Culture projects, just as the dominance of the GNU GPL enables interoperability among Free Software projects. It thus eliminates an unnecessary and unproductive hinderance to the spread and growth of Free Culture.
