On 7/4/06, Michael R. Irwin michael_irwin@verizon.net wrote:
Brad Patrick wrote in part:
Licensing others to publish, from the WMF perspective is not a big step, and is to WMF's great financial advantage.
snip
Assuming the content must be licensed from the WMF is a violation of the FDL and it could be argued an attempt to exploit the name brand recognition of the GNU FDL without meeting the responsibilities of its use.
I have never suggested such a thing.
It seems pretty easy to me to delineate that the trademarks and logos of
the WMF may be licensed separately for use in advertising and sales promotion to any publishing effort using the FDL'ed material in ways mutually acceptable to the WMF and the publisher. Any customer who purchased the content could in turn modify the content and the attributions appropriately and then republish without the use of the WMF trademarks or logos.
Bingo.
Clearly any licensing arrangement for the trademarks or logos should
include a right to review and cancel the use of the trademarks and logos in inappropriate fashions.
It's not extortion of free content. It's being smart about marketing and endorsements. Managing licenses implies quality control; that is not the same thing as instituting a requirement for every single book composed of WMF-project related content.
I wasn't around for Big Cats. Going forward, I hope we can achieve clarity with minimal transactional friction from the community and publishers. We aren't here to be obstructionist.