On 05/08/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Something I've seen on enwp, and I suspect it's probably around quietly on Commons as well - people licensing their images and then adding (pre-emptively) a note saying "by the way, if you want to use it for X or Y, go ahead with no strings attached, don't feel the need to ask me permission".
That's a clearly nonfree license - should we prevent people doing this as well? If not, where do we draw a line?
I don't quite understand what the problem here is? Is it the implication that others should ask for permission first? Because it's only an implication - not a fact.
I do feel it's helpful to our reusers - Commons serving to provide free content to the wider community as well as WMF - to list all the possible criteria under which an image can be used, to give them flexibility. Perhaps what we need to consider here is *emphasising* the free license[s] - the one we use it under - and having a clearly secondary "other reuse licenses" line?
I don't quite know what you mean -- all the criteria under which an image can be used? Commons accepts the Freedom Defined definition of "free-content license" which lists what freedoms must be allowed for a license to be considered a "free" one.
I agree that we should actively discourage people from doing this kind of tricky thing, just as we should actively encourage people to upload hi-res originals, and not just be content with people uploading thumbnails or watermarked images. We should try and push the free-content line, but I don't think that means we need to refuse freely-licensed (but trickily managed) works when people do things like this.
What we really need to do is find out why they think this is necessary, and badger them into understanding it's not that cool. Maybe their goals won't align with ours and they won't change their mind. That's OK, we can still take their work and move on. ;)
So in line with that I think we should continue to allow 2nd or 3rd licenses to be non-free, but we should not allow any template for this situation. Keep the situation that people have to manually write the non-free licenses. Apparently templates do funny things to people's brains :)
cheers Brianna