[WikiEN-l] Non-Commercial Usage

[Neil Harris]

Mike Finucane wrote:
> I thought Wikipedia stood for this; apparently I was wrong, as also 
> evidenced by reason (2):
>
> (2) "On the other hand, have you considered getting rich off ours?... 
> I hear that running Google ads on well-formatted copies of Wikipedia 
> can be quite lucrative." and "commercial re-use of Wikipedia isn't 
> limited to certain people, you can take part too."
>
> My purchase price, I'm afraid, is a little higher than that.

Oh dear. I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't trying to buy you -- 
indeed, I'm not sure I'd have a use for you, and you'd take up space 
around the house, and need feeding, and so forth -- but rather to point 
out that if you have an issue with other people making money off 
Wikipedia, you also have the same opportunity. It's a symmetrical, even, 
fair deal. One you are Free to take up, or not. Nobody's forcing you. 
Other people's gain is not your loss, when you are playing a 
non-zero-sum game.

An encyclopedia which cannot be used commercially is necessarily a 
limited encyclopedia that limits other people's Freedom; if you want to 
release your content under one CC-license, and another under another, 
and yet another contributor wants to release theirs under another 
license of their own devising, and so on, we end up with an encyclopedia 
which has to be unpicked by machine filtration driven by legal, rather 
than encyclopedic, principles before it can be re-used. In any case, it 
will end up being full of holes once filtration has been performed to 
remove the incompatible material.

The same Freedom which allows one person to make money from GFDL content 
allows me to give it away for nothing; indeed, I've spent many thousands 
of hours writing for Wikipedia, and not asked for a penny for it, 
because I genuinely believe in a Free encyclopedia, for everyone.

Regarding the rest of your E-mail:

* try actually reading the GFDL, which is the linchpin of the entire project
* particularly the bits about transparent copies and derivative works

then keep on re-reading and re-reading it until the penny drops.

It's quite a lengthy document, and I think you'll find that Richard 
Stallman (no capitalist tycoon he, and a great friend of freedom with a 
capital F) has been quite thorough in anticipating the possible nasty 
things that people might try to do, by carefully only allowing them to 
do things with GFDL content which do not limit the Freedom of others.

-- Neil