​ ​The article mentions "no considerations of public good". Even Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, as well as all Wikipedia developers would probably argue against that sentence.​ Because most know that Google gives a ton of free software away (not just from their developers freely giving 20% time back to the Open Source world a year) for all the world to use, most of which is here: https://github.com/google/ (Let alone handing Freebase data over and helping develop a Primary Sources Tool) Lest we forget.... https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=tina+turner Look at the right side Google Knowledge Graph panel.... Wikipedia is displayed as sources of information. Wikipedia gets attribution and a bit of free advertising. Thad +ThadGuidry <https://www.google.com/+ThadGuidry>​

On 20.06.2016 19:57, Stas Malyshev wrote: I think at least one group of people will read the small links very carefully: spammers who want to get visibility on Google. I am not sure if it would be so good for us at the current stage (with our current anti-spam infrastructure) to widely advertise Wikidata as an entry point to Google (which I still believe it is not, but things might change, and the question of how we want this to be displayed might come up eventually). The SEO people already try to convince others that Google is using Wikidata, but I think they also are aware of the fact that this is all but clear so far. At the time when Google really starts using our data in significant ways, and this becomes publicly documented, we need to be prepared for a lot more spam than we are seeing now. Markus -- Markus Kroetzsch Faculty of Computer Science Technische Universität Dresden +49 351 463 38486 http://korrekt.org/

Hi! Added to that, even if it *were* possible to copyright facts, I think using restrictive license (and make no mistake, any license that requires people to do specific things in exchange for data access *is* restrictive) makes a lot of trouble for any people using the data. This is especially true for data that is meant for automatic processing - you will have to add code to track licenses for each data unit, figure out how exactly to comply with the license (which would probably require professional help, always expensive), track license-contaminated data throughout the mixed databases, verify all outputs to ensure only properly-licensed data goes out... It presents so much trouble many people would just not bother with it. It would hinder exactly the thing opens source excels at - creating community of people building on each other's work by means of incremental contribution and wide participation. Want to create cool a visualization based on Wikidata? Talk to a lawyer first. Want kickstart your research exploration using Wikidata facts? To the lawyer you go. Want to write an article on, say, gender balance in science over the ages and places, and feature Wikidata facts as an example? Where's that lawyer's email again? You get the picture, I hope. How many people would decide "well, it would be cool but I have no time and resource to figure out all the license issues" and not do the next cool thing they could do? Is it something we really want to happen? And all that trouble to no benefit to anyone - there's absolutely no threat of Wikidata database being taken over and somehow subverted by "enterprises", whatever that nebulous term means. In fact, if Google example shows us anything, it's that "enterprises" are not very good at it and don't really want it. Would they benefit from the free and open data? Of course they would, as would everybody. The world - including everybody, including "enterprises" - benefited enormously from free and open participatory culture, be it open source software or free data. It is a *good thing*, not something to be afraid of! Wikidata data is meant for free use and reuse. Let's not erect artificial barriers to it out of misguided fear to somehow benefit somebody "wrong". -- Stas Malyshev smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org

All, first, thanks for your reply blog, Gerard. On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 1:00 PM, Markus Kroetzsch &lt;markus.kroetzsch(a)tu-dresden.de&gt; wrote: So do I. The original article ends with: "Among all Wikimedia projects, Wikidata is conspicuously alone in not being copylefted." Copylefting or not has been heavily and religiously debated for many, many years in the open source community. I have never seen strong examples why either would be better for open source. Second, data is not text and is not source code. It's different and "conspicuously alone" is a false argument. "Perhaps we should start asking why that is the case" Two possible reasons given above. Add to that what Gerard wrote. "and whose interests benefit from weak licensing choices," No, that's the wrong way around. CCZero is a stronger license (actually, it's not a license, but a waiver): it gives people more freedom, removes many more hurdles. "and start to organize ourselves to fix this" There is nothing to fix. CCZero without copylefting gives more freedom and for me that main reason to invest my time. Before you start talking about "fixing", realize you will also loose. Greetings, Egon (this is a personal opinion, and may not reflect the interest of my employer) -- E.L. Willighagen Homepage: http://egonw.github.com/ LinkedIn: http://se.linkedin.com/in/egonw Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/ PubList: http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/tag/papers ORCID: 0000-0001-7542-0286 ImpactStory: https://impactstory.org/EgonWillighagen