On 1/13/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Absolutely, there's lots of reasons, but the reasons should be there on an item by item basis. Do we need to indiscriminately host their entire corpus of maps when we only have use for a few?
There are very few things we need to do. In this case the reason is why not?
We all love to hate M*******t,
Speak for yourself.
partly because it dominates its industry.
Plently of other industries have been dominated to the same degree without the same level of disslike.
We need to be conscious of not becoming resentfully referred to as W*******a because of our dominance.
Nah people will find plently of other reasons to disslike us. They already do.
I think that it's important to view ourselves as a part of a community of websites developing free access to information. That requires maintaining the respect of other members of that community, and you don't do that by raiding their efforts.
How many flicker images do we have these days anyway. One of the common values of provideing free stuff is seeing it reused.
The survival of a vision depends on sharing that vision, and that cannot happen if our allied co-visionaries are put in a position where they need to defend their efforts from the superpower on the block.
Why would they need to do that? What do people lose by haveing their material on wikimedia projects?
You see a key part of the vission of free material is that others will use it. There are probably near 1000 sites that use large chunks of wikimedia material.
Ethical considerations rest upon forseeing the consequences of one's own actions. Ethics are not governed by rules and laws, nor are they imposed through fear of arbitrary ounishment. Ethics involves a willingness to be at a disadvantage when it is the right thing to do.
That would really rather depend on the system of ethics. Calling your morality an ethical system does not make it so.