Hallo Liste,
Hier mal ein Vorschlag für die Email an die ESA, leider schon wieder viel zu lang und ich hab sooo schrecklich viel mehr gute Gründe irgendwie müssen wir die knackig formuliert alle drinhaben):
--- An: Mrs. Imbert-Vier CC:
Dear Mrs. Imbert-Vier,
Some months ago I had asked you for permission to use the images of the ESA image gallery in the popular multilingual free online encyclopedia Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org ).
As Wikipedia is licensed as so called "Free content" under the GFDL similar to the popular GPL licensed Linux operating system we are unable to embedd content that is licensed for non commercial use only as it is with your very high quality images.
You confirmed me in our previous email conversation, that you will not relicense your content under a free license so all images of ESA curtesy were deleted inmediately as their license is not compatible with the license of our content.
As I had read some weeks ago in the newspaper that the ESA is considering changing their image policy with respect to the release of the images of the Huygens probe on Titan I had kept new hope that there is a possibility to convince you in releasing your images more freely.
So I had got in contact with Mr. Bernhard von Weyhe on ESOC some days ago (I had got an answer from him regarding the use of ESA images, shortly after yours but I didn't answer to him as you already had given me a definite answer) and he suggested me after a phone call to write once again to you in short our aims of Wikipedia etc. and why we are so interested in your content and why it might be interesting for ESA in supporting us.
Behind Wikipedia is a non-profit organisation called the "Wikimedia Foundation" (placed in Florida/USA), headed by the Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales. Its aim is to give the world acess to free knowledge (free in the meaning of "free speach") especially in languages that have no educational content (as languages of the third world).
The Wikimedia foundation has already walked quite a large way into this direction with its flag ship project (beside others) - the Wikipedia. It is currently in over 100 languages and has all in all far more than 1 Million articles in all languages. It is seen as equal to "Microsoft Encarta" and the "Ecyclopaedia Britannica" (and others) from independent institutions (as news papers).
The radical new of Wikipedia is its community editorial principle and its free license. Everyone is allowed to edit articles (even without registration) online in a collaboration software called "wiki". The free license guarantees that our content is free and will be free. Everyone can use it for every pupose (also sellingt it) as long as he respects the conditions of the GFDL. This is very similar to the famous Linux operating system.
The interesting thing is: This radical concepts works better than ever expected and the content produced within Wikipedia is of very remarkable quality. Now its content gets used by millions of people every day in the whole world.
At the moment we can't use your images within Wikipedia but are very interested in doing so, as we have lots of articles about space science and the ESA and its projects. At the moment we can only use the images of the NASA (and we use them very extensive) as they are forced by the US-American "Freedom information act" to publish their content within the public domain. So at the moment there is no balance in the representation of space science content in Wikipedia. ESA certainly deserves it to have a more appealing public representation and one big point are the images.
So I pledge for a free release of the ESA images. You won't loose anything with this step in contrary you will win and of course will get more interest from the public.
This petition is supported officially by the Wikimedia representatives, namley
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Yours sincerly, Daniel Arnold - a Wikipedia contributor