On 26/03/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/26/07, Vee vee.be.me@gmail.com wrote:
From the forum:
Larry Sanger: "The conclusion you are trying to establish is that we
cannot
relicense our versions of Wikipedia articles with GFDL and CC. Why not? Does the GFDL explicitly forbid licensing works under another license in addition?"
Is he seriously suggesting that they can basically just license our
works
under whatever license they please as long as they also license it under
the
GFDL?
I can't believe they've gone 'live' without even sorting out basic
copyright
issues... CZ is a joke.
It's baffling that the founder of this project has only a cursory knowledge of copyright, less than an experienced wikipedia editor.
However, what bothers me the most isn't necessarily the legalities, but the ethics of what they are doing. Wikipedia is a proud member of the free content movement, and we give our content away for free for others to use. We believe it is The Right Thing to Do. We didn't have to do it, but we did. They would like to take that content that we produced, modify it slightly, and then not release their content in the same way we have. Even though we did the majority of the work.
It's an absolute disgrace. The contributors to Citizendium should feel ashamed about what their founder and fellow editors are saying. I know I would, if I were in that situation.
--Oskar
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You've summed up exactly how I feel here. I don't care so much that CZ is copypasting from Wikipedia, per se, but that (from what I have read on their site) they are trying to do it in such a way that we won't be able to take back from them if we should want to. It's disgusting to think that they are trying to get a lift off the backs of hard-working Wikipedia editors without having to credit them for their work or use their work in the way it was intended. It's totally against the spirit of what we're trying to do here and is very underhanded and well, plain wrong. When I first heard of CZ I thought that it sounded like an interesting and potentially useful project but the more I see and hear of the attitudes of Larry Sanger and (it seems) a lot of the editors there, the more I think that it's ultimately going to fail. I hope that Sanger finds away to move on from his anti-Wikipedia grudge and considers things from the perspective of improving Citizendium, not harming Wikipedia.
As for their current licensing status, according to the site:
Articles that originated in part from Wikipedia are available under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. All new articles will be available under an open content license yet to be determined.
It's good that Wikipedia articles are going to keep their GFDL license, but I guess it remains to be seen if they're going to try to multi-license.