Mike Finucane wrote:
In reply to:
Because Wikipedia is free as in freedom. Your pictures are not free (though apparently they are gratis); you are limiting who can
distribute
them. Please re-evaluate contributing to Wikipedia if you are unwilling to support freedom.
My answer is that I do not see how enriching private corporations furthers freedom. My pictures are indeed gratis. The only objection I have is to allowing others to make profits from my work.
There is a German company who, now for the third time, sells a copy of the German Wikipedia on DVD. They sell it for €9,90 and make little profit of that (last time they gave €1 per DVD sold to Wikimedia). Mostly, it is a PR thing, as well as the ability to offer a current encyclopedia (they usually specialize in public domain texts on CD).
We have the encyclopedia. They have the software and the infrastructure to distribute it on DVD. The end user has the ability to buy a good encyclopedia on DVD for a decent price.
You can not honestly tell me that the above is a bad thing. In fact, many German wikipedians, myself included, have actively helped that company to get these DVDs ready, as unpaid volunteers, because it is a good thing.
However, your images would have to be excluded from such a DVD.
Face it: Noone will become insanely rich by selling images from Wikipedia, yours or other people's. And even if one or the other image turns up in some high-quality production, GFDL or CC-BY-SA make sure they'll have to credit the author, which would mean free advertising for you.
On the other hand, there is a market for low-priced works, encyclopedia, wikibook, wiki-reader or whatever, that will extend the range of people we can reach to those whithout (permanent) internet access. If someone provides, say, printed wikipedia editions, and charges his printing costs plus a few bucks to keep his business afloat, so what? Would you go to peolpe who would buy such a printed edition, or who would be given one by some organisation that buys them, ans say "sorry, folks, you could have had an encyclopedia, but someone would have made $5 of it, and that's unacceptable"?
I, for one, will keep co-licensing my pictures under GFDL and CC-BY-SA, so *our readers* can (hopefully) profit from them. Truth is, noone would by my pictures anyway. So if someome manages to sell them, lucky him. I don't mind.
Magnus