From: Jimmy Wales
>
> If we were starting wikipedia from scratch today, I would prefer to
> create a wikipedia license that says "You can redistribute this
> content under GNU FDL, CC-SA, or additional free licenses that may be
> specified from time to time on this page."
>
> But isn't it too late for that?
Why not add a "from <chose your date> the license is changed to...",
and ask all contributers to sign on a page if they retroactively agree,
and theoretically one could filter out all articles not covered and rewrite those is necessary.
Schewek
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Schewek wrote:
>Why not add a "from <chose your date>
>the license is changed to...", and ask all
>contributers to sign on a page if they
>retroactively agree, and theoretically one
>could filter out all articles not covered and
>rewrite those is necessary.
You mentioned articles and not modules so I assume you are talking about
Wikipedia. In short: that's impossible on practical grounds. There have
probably been more than 20,000 people who have edited Wikipedia and most of
them were either anonymous or didn't leave an email address behind that is
still active.
Depending on the change many people may also opt not to agree to the change -
I would probably be one of those just on the principal that we shouldn't
change things like our license arbitrarily (it has worked great so far; so
why rock the boat?).
That is still possible for the textbook project though - however most of the
content being placed there so far is GFDLd textbooks that were created
elsewhere and copied Wikipedia text.
We can discuss the possibility of changing license terms when somebody finds
an impressive non-FDLd free text resource whose copyright owner declines our
nicely-worded request to grant us a GFDL license of their work.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Toby wrote:
>But anybody can add Invariant Sections.
>So if GNU FDL with Invariant Sections is not free,
>then GNU FDL without them is not copyleft.
Well the Debian people want to consider the GNU FDL non-copyleft - that is
their right. But they do not own the term. Anyway...
The Invariant Sections issue is very troublesome to me and we really need to
work with the GNU people to remove this option from future versions of their
license (for the sake of free content we must do this because it is not
possible to change Wikipedia's license). I would furthermore /strongly/ argue
that we do not accept any GNU FDL text in any Wikimedia project that has
Invariant Sections. The last thing we need is to become infected with that
garbage.
>The Creative Commons SA licence, in contrast,
>has no such problems. It is by any objective measure
>the superior licence;
I tend to agree but in the real world the GNU FDL is the license used by the
great majority of free content (not just Wikipedia ; CC is a suite of
licenses, not a single license, but together they are gaining some ground).
So our strategy should be to go with the flow and try to change that license
instead of making things really complicated by having a bunch of different
licenses within one project.
I'm sure RMS will listen to our concerns since Wikipedia is by far the largest
GNU FDL project in the world and I'm sure RMS is also concerned about
Debian's decision. The whole point of the GNU FDL was to have a license for
software documentation and yet anybody who wants their documentation in
Debian won't use this license - hence the license needs to be overhauled.
But in the meantime it is already difficult enough to get people to understand
our one license - let's not add another and make it even more complicated.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
Toby wrote:
>...
>If a textbook project that wants to use material
>from Wikipedia, then it can make a decision that
>it wants this material more than the mere
>possibility of material under some other licence.
And where exactly is the material from this other
license at? That type of long term planning is also
really bizarre in the wiki world - where are the
crystal balls we should use in order to find out what
license this magical text will be under? However, what
we have /right now/ is a HUGE open content resource
that will almost certainly be ENORMOUS in a couple
years. This is a prediction we can bank on.
>If you have a specific use in mind for a large
>chunk of text, then this shouldn't be a very
>difficult choice to make!
Yep - use Wikipedia and public domain text as your
primary resources (it is gotten us this far!). I still
would like to know of /any/ other body of open content
text at all comparable to Wikipedia that we could use
for textbooks. Mixing and matching licenses will
prevent the free exchange of text to and from
Wikipedia and most madenly from between our textbooks!
It is best to work with what we have right now and
continually work with the copyleft viral license
makers to make their licenses compatible with each
other.
PLEASE let's not fork the project before it even
starts.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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Hi all,
Wikipedia is a great success and its editorial process proved to be capable
of producing collaboratively content of good quality.
I wonder if the same paradigm can be extended to writing open source
textbooks. There are textbooks that were released into open source by their
authors/publishers but as far as I know there have never been any attempt
to write a textbook the wiki way.
Textbooks are mostly written by academics and academics are not very fond
of Wikipedia. Textbooks are written by one author or one author writes one
or a few chapters. I don't know if people like Karl Wick would be pleased
with a crowd of random editors to the text he has already written. It might
be counter-productive, time consuming and ineffective for him to discuss,
explain, or somtimes fight to defend his vision. He probably would be
grateful for comments and ideas but I'm not so sure about re-writing his
text and putting in incompatible ideas and frameworks.
I think a cookbook or howto type of books might succeed.
I am not trying to be a critic of the whole idea I would like to discuss
some of my concerns in the early phase of the project.
Regards,
Kpjas
Jimmy, if I didn't know better, I might think that you
weren't giving Mr Forte the benefit of the doubt as to his
personal experience, or not listening with empathy, or
something.
Probably just having a bad day ... :-)
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Hello,
Jimmy Wales (Jimbo) was kind enough to invite me to the wikipedia list as a way to contribute, and gain feedback for one of my current projects. The project is called The California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) www.opensourcetext.org
The idea is to utilize open source and innovative content licensing (via Creative Commons www.creativecommons.org ) to help California realize a initial significant savings, and eventual complete elimination of its $400M+ (and rising) annual debt for K-12 textbooks.
This project has been lobbied to the Governor's office, the State Senate and Assembly, the California Teacher's Assn., several foundations, and many others.
Most of those who have had benefit of hearing about COSTP in detail are impressed with the possibilities. It will take a combination of political will, and a pilot that proves the concept (not necessarily in that order) to make this work.
We would like to get a pilot going, and what I'm currently thinking about doing - in the absence of funds - is starting something up via the Connexions Project at Rice University http://cnx.rice.edu/
I will be adding more information, in the way of updates, and a more complete project business model to the site soon.
All feedback is welcome. I understand this is a forum set up to share ideas, and am delighted to share what little I know about this area.
Thanks again,
Sanford
Sanford Forte, Founder and Director
California Open Source Textbook Project
Palo Alto, CA
www.opensourcetext.org
Check it out: a search on Google for "open content organic
chemistry textbook" brings up as its top result a page that
I created 3 days ago on the textbook WP site:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=open+content+organic…
I think it helps that I included key words in the page like
organic chemistry, open content, and textbook.
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Erik wrote:
>....
>Just the basics:
>1) Name of the project
>2) Types of content that are to be covered
>3) Key policies
>4) Timetable for setting things up
>5) Potential changes that need to be made to the
>software
>6) Templates
>7) Internationalization
>8) Participants
That seems reasonable - so long as 2, 3 and 6 aren't too specific or time
consuming.
--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)