Sorry, But my question is not if we as a wikimedia group is violating the license, but if they as users are. I would like a professional opinion on the question :
Is wikipedia non commercial or commercial non profit?
thanks,
mike
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com wrote:
It is my opinion that we should be careful of people who are using restricted software for contributions because it might be in violation of some licenses.
No, we should not. Whatever licenses they are violating, we are not a party to these licenses and we are not violating them.
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I would like a professional opinion on the question :
Better stated, I would like your opinion on this, if it is not off topic.
Is wikipedia non commercial or commercial non profit?
Is working on the wikipedia more like a commercial non profit work and not really non commecial in terms of the microsoft licenses quoted.
thanks,
mike
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 12:55 PM, jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com wrote:
I would like a professional opinion on the question :
Better stated, I would like your opinion on this, if it is not off topic.
Is wikipedia non commercial or commercial non profit?
Is working on the wikipedia more like a commercial non profit work and not really non commecial in terms of the microsoft licenses quoted.
Thank you for revising your question.
(1) As with many things: The question with the greatest impact is: Does anyone care? There are a lot of questions which are very hard to clearly answer but which do not create problems simply because no one cares. I've never heard of a major software company hauling someone to court over a non-commercial/educational use license, and while it's probably happened I doubt it's a frequent occurrence.
(2) The actual answer to your question depends on the definition of "non-commercial" in the particular license. If non-commercial isn't clearly defined for the purpose of the license then the question is unanswerable, and the user is at their own risk. I'm doubtful that any two commercial software vendors achieves a "non-comercial use only" restriction in the same way.
(3) Another way of looking at this is this— By our own rules, materials submitted to Wikipedia must be freely licensed for all kinds of use, including clearly commercial ones. If a "non-commercial use only" software license permitted use for Wikipedia then it would be possible to launder works through Wikipedia in order to make them available for commercial use. This would probably not be a desired effect, but it may be the common reality; see (1).
(4) If some of our own users are violating their licenses while contributing, thats unfortunate but it's a risk that they've personally chosen to take which we can't control. From this perspective the non-commercial issue is, at worse, little different from using completely unlicensed software... also something we can't control.
(5) Of course, many people in the Wikipedia communities recommend users use Free Software and our project pages reflect these recommendations. Free Software enables the collaboration and cooperation which are essential to the Wikimedia projects, avoids complicated software license permission concerns, and supports the openness and transparency which should be common to good scholarship.
Considering (4) and (5), this is basically off-topic... To the (almost non-existent) extent that we have any effective policy at all on software that our users use it is to recommend that they use Free Software; we can't know how users software is licensed; any license violation by a user that did exist would be their issue rather than ours.
Cheers,
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I've never heard of a major software company hauling someone to court over a non-commercial/educational use license, and while it's probably happened I doubt it's a frequent occurrence.
Probably doesn't fit your "major software company" definition, but: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProCD_v._Zeidenberg
In addition to a case like that (which involved redistribution), I'm sure lots of large companies have gotten fined for noncommercial-only software found during a software license compliance audit.
Which doesn't really answer the question, but:
*If you're editing Wikipedia from work for non-work reasons, you're probably breaking company policy as well as tax laws anyway. *If you're editing Wikipedia from home, the issue is highly unlikely to reach a court anyway.
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I've never heard of a major software company hauling someone to court over a non-commercial/educational use license, and while it's probably happened I doubt it's a frequent occurrence.
Probably doesn't fit your "major software company" definition, but: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProCD_v._Zeidenberg
In addition to a case like that (which involved redistribution), I'm sure lots of large companies have gotten fined for noncommercial-only software found during a software license compliance audit.
Which doesn't really answer the question, but:
*If you're editing Wikipedia from work for non-work reasons, you're probably breaking company policy as well as tax laws anyway. *If you're editing Wikipedia from home, the issue is highly unlikely to reach a court anyway.
Yes, But What I see is this, in my paranoid mind:
Company M prohibits X. Company M gives students Z software Y to do something prohibited. Student Z contributes software using software Y to project P. Company M wants to now charge royalties for project P for violations, because it knows that the work was infringing on some rights.
Basically I am worred about these student versions of windows "infecting" open source projects with illegal contributions.
Just a crazy idea that has been following me.
mike
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 2:47 PM, jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com < jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com> wrote:
Basically I am worred about these student versions of windows "infecting" open source projects with illegal contributions.
Nikola Smolenski answered that: "Whatever licenses they are violating, we are not a party to these licenses and we are not violating them."
I'm not sure about other jurisdictions, but that's my understanding of the law in the US. If those students are illegally using Windows, that's their problem, and only their problem. Their violation doesn't "infect" the open source projects they contribute to simply because they are using Windows illegally.
I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice. But it seems pretty straightforward.
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:47 AM, jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com wrote: <snip>
Basically I am worred about these student versions of windows "infecting" open source projects with illegal contributions.
Just a crazy idea that has been following me.
Rest assured, it is simply a crazy idea. Microsoft has intellectual property right to their own software and codebase (so you can't copy parts of Windows and call it open source), but they don't have any follow-on rights to works wholly created by their users.
If I create a novel in Microsoft Word, then Microsoft has no rights that novel, even if the copy of Word I used was completely stolen. They could sue me for the cost of the lost revenue if I am not using a properly licensed copy of their software, but they would have no direct claims over the intellectual works I created using it.
-Robert Rohde
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 9:16 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:47 AM, jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com wrote:
<snip>
Basically I am worred about these student versions of windows "infecting" open source projects with illegal contributions.
Just a crazy idea that has been following me.
Rest assured, it is simply a crazy idea. Microsoft has intellectual property right to their own software and codebase (so you can't copy parts of Windows and call it open source), but they don't have any follow-on rights to works wholly created by their users.
If I create a novel in Microsoft Word, then Microsoft has no rights that novel, even if the copy of Word I used was completely stolen. They could sue me for the cost of the lost revenue if I am not using a properly licensed copy of their software, but they would have no direct claims over the intellectual works I created using it.
-Robert Rohde
That is what I was looking for. Thank you all for you time. Thank you for humoring me. Thanks Robert. mike
jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com wrote:
Sorry, But my question is not if we as a wikimedia group is violating the license, but if they as users are. I would like a professional opinion on the question :
Is wikipedia non commercial or commercial non profit?
It makes no difference. Wikipedia licenses everything on for commercial use. As you cannot relicense someone else's work, you cannot use a NC license worked. Most NC licensees probably wouldn't mind wikipedia reusing stuff, but they don't want big media reusing it.
On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 2:04 PM, wiki-lists@phizz.demon.co.uk wrote:
It makes no difference. Wikipedia licenses everything on for commercial use. As you cannot relicense someone else's work, you cannot use a NC license worked. Most NC licensees probably wouldn't mind wikipedia reusing stuff, but they don't want big media reusing it.
In case others are confused by the tangent here; Please note: jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com wrote:
It is my opinion that we should be careful of people who are using restricted software for contributions because it might be in violation of some licenses.
He's asking about a different issue: If it's okay to use software which is licensed only for non-commercial use to create material for Wikipedia. This is unrelated to creative commons' -NC licenses.
jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com wrote:
Sorry, But my question is not if we as a wikimedia group is violating the license, but if they as users are. I would like a professional opinion on the question :
Is wikipedia non commercial or commercial non profit?
It's hard to say as long as it hasn't been before the courts. A professional opinion is just as much a guess as anyone else's.
Even if it turns out to be commercial, it only means something if someone tries to enforce that aspect of the licence.
Ec
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