Am Dienstag, 1. März 2005 22:48 schrieb Zinnmann:
ich bin mal über Deinen Entwurf rübergegangen und hab
ihn etwas
getrafft und gegliedert. Sicher ist das noch nicht optimal (vor allem
mein Englisch nicht :-), aber es geht mE schon in die richtige
Richtung. Wichtig ist, dass wir den Benefit, den die ESA von einer
"Kooperation" hätte noch deutlicher heraus stellen. Auch eine weitere
Straffung wäre vorteilhaft.
Danke, sehr gut deine Bearbeitung find ich besser als mein langatmiges
Geschwafel. ;-). Ich habe es jetzt mal noch etwas poliert. Zu den "Benefits"
habe ich jetzt noch nicht mehr geschrieben, wir müssen das irgendwie noch
straffen ohne Inhalt zu verlieren:
---
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
[1].
Now - some weeks ago - I had read in the news that the ESA is considering
changing their picture policy with respect to the release of the images of
the Huygens probe on Titan. So I contacted Mr. Bernhard von Weyhe on ESOC
some days ago and he suggested to me mailing again to you and to summarize in
short the essential facts about wikipedia and why we think, that a release of
ESA pictures under GNU FDL licence would be beneficial for you, too.
1. What is Wikipedia?
-----
Wikipedia is a free (free in the meaning of "free speach") encyclopaedia.
It depends on free content that is edited by volunteers from all over the
world. Behind Wikipedia is a non-profit organisation called the "Wikimedia
Foundation" (placed in Florida/USA), headed by the Wikipedia founder Jimbo
Wales. Wikipedia is now in its fifth year and keeps exponentially growing.
Independent newspapers have repeatedly stated, that wikipedia is an serious
and over all reliable alternative to traditional encyclopaedias like
Encyclopaedia Britannica or Microsoft Encarta.
2. What is the GNU Free Documentation License?
-----
As Wikipedia is licensed as so called "Free content" under the GFDL [2] which
has very similar using conditions as the 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.
3. What if ESA pictures would be released under GNU FDL (or equally free)?
-----
So 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 officially supported by the Wikimedia representatives, namely
1
2
3
4
...
Yours sincerly,
Daniel Arnold - a Wikipedia contributor
[1]
http://www.wikipedia.org
[2]
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#FDL