Petition an die ESA - VereinDE-l

1 Mar 2005


      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):
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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