Mike Finucane wrote:
The only objection I have is to allowing others to make profits from my work. That definition of freedom isnt in my dictionary.
Mike, there are probably dimensions to this which you have not considered.
Right now, African schools (for example) suffer under a situation in which proprietary textbooks generate absurd profits for publishers who keep prices high. They therefore cannot afford new up-to-date textbooks and generally go without or use very old used textbooks.
A non-commercial-only license does not help them nearly as much as a free license, because a free license makes possible a competitive marketplace. Enterpreneurs can find an opportunity in taking your freely licensed photos and freely licensed wikipedia/wikibooks/wiktionary/etc. content and building it into something useful, at a *far lower cost*.
If you think it's dishonorable to make money by providing a useful service in a non-proprietary way, then of course we'll never agree.
But it sounds to me like what you are opposed to is not *profit* per se, but *locking things up*. If you said, "I don't want to contribute my work to the commons if that means that some company can make a proprietary version and not give any changes they make back to the community" then I would agree with you completely: this is why I like copyleft.
--Jimbo