Jimmy Wales wrote:
I'm pleased to announce the existence of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit corporation organized under the laws of Florida, United States. I am transferring to this new corporation the assets that follow:
- All Nupedia.com/net/org/etc. domain names
- All Wikipedia.com/net/org/etc. domain names
- All copyrights in software or articles that were
previously owned by Bomis, Inc. and already placed under a copyleft license. (This includes work-for-hire by Jason, Tim, Larry, Toan, Liz, and myself, as well as any other Bomis employees who may have worked on these projects as a part of their job, but doesn't include any work by thoseparties conducted on their own time or while not an employee of Bomis.)
Sweet! Thanks for setting up the Foundation (especially with the name "Wikimedia"). As the owner of the Wikimedia.org and Wiktionary.org domain names I hereby transfer ownership and control of these domain names to the Wikimedia Foundation as soon as it is in the position to receive these assets (per your personal email to me Jimbo).
I also noticed the Nupedia stuff. Does that mean that Nupedia is also now part of the Wikimedia family? I'm not certain if the Nupedians (if there are any left or who care) would be too happy about that.... Oh well, maybe we can bring some life to that project. I still think Nupedia (perhaps under the name GNUpedia) should be refactored to be a repository of expert-approved Wikipedia articles (along the lines of Larry's Sifter project). Thus that project would be a stable distribution of Wikipedia content but all editing would still take place at Wikipedia.
Which reminds me that gnupedia.org and gnupedia.com are also owned by Bomis (IIRC). Are these domain names included with point 1?
Oh, and I'm going to assign copyright to all my edits to Wikimedia as part of my Will and since I plan on living a very long time it will be awhile before Wikimedia owns my text. I am still weary about having one entity in control of so much content (which brings up the possibility of proprietary forks if, for example, Wikimedia goes bankrupt and creditors try to sell Wikimedia's assets).
Is there a way for Wikipedia authors to grant Wikimedia the ability to defend the author's GNU FDLd copyrighted text without requiring the author to transfer ownership to Wikimedia? Or am I confusing "ownership" and "assignment"?
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)