On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 9:47 AM, Massimiliano m.lincetto@gmail.com wrote:
I still don't understand why we should reject the copyleft philosophy and change to an attribution license. I think that our mission is not only to provide free information and knowledge, but also to be sure that it will be kept free. I don't think that we should change our licensing policies in order to be published on Google Knol: why we should do it? If Knols wants to allow its users to publish Wikipedia-derivative content they should change their terms, IMHO.
I think giving up copyleft only to be reusable by a big guy like Knol would sign the death of copyleft. It is a rather different situation compared to using a small part of a Wikipedia article without having to release the whole content under copyleft - particularly with the mammoth clause of putting the whole letter of GFDL. There are endless discussions about which licence between cc-by or cc-by-sa is freer. I believe that at the moment there is little improvement of the content of Wikipedia done outside Wikipedia, so whether this is freely licensed (what would be imposed by -sa) or copyrighted is not that relevant on a practical point of view. If people will create new content with derivatives of Knol and will copyright it, than the point of copyleft will be more clear (and people may debate whether copyleft is an obstacle to the creation of knowledge).
Cruccone