Gregory, the problem with your position is the fundamental assumption of bad faith that runs through so many of your arguments. Whether it's Creative Commons 3.0 or a collaboration with the Archive, other organizations are always insufficiently committed to freedom and therefore impossible to collaborate with. The problem with this kind of free culture isolationism is that dogmatic blindness achieves exactly the opposite of what you are hoping for. It will lead to other projects which haven't spend a minute even thinking about the implications of copyright and file format policies becoming dominant, simply because they choose to adopt mainstream technology and put ease of use before anything else. It will lead to us being overwhelmed and understaffed as we refuse to accept help from anyone who isn't already carrying the same flag we are carrying. We need balance and reason, not dogma and hostility. Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, Mozilla, and others are very valuable institutions of a broadly defined movement towards making terabytes worth of cultural works available online, reducing barriers to access, providing freely usable & freely licensed tools, developing sane legal frameworks, and so on. I, too, would prefer it if these institutions would generally advocate similarly high standards of freedom as we do, and where this is not the case, I generally try to persuade them to do so. However, that does not negate their efforts, nor does it mean that we should avoid working with them. We should try to help them when we think they could do better. We should treat them as potential friends and allies, not alienate them with a priori assumptions about their motives and their direction. Case in point: You argue that the Archive is not a suitable partner because they are currently not supporting Theora. Well, they are already supporting Vorbis for many of their audio collections, and according to Brewster, the main reason for the lack of Theora support is quite simply that there has not been substantial demand for it so far. We, as a partner, could make it quite clear that Theora is a requirement for a collaboration around video hosting. Indeed, I already said as much to Brewster, and he signaled that adding Theora support to their transcoding pipeline would not be much of an issue at all. If you want to effect policy changes in other organizations, you need to start talking to them! A partnership with WMF would push them towards adopting free formats, because it would be an implicit requirement for such a partnership to happen. Similarly, their Terms of Service were last updated in March 2001, before Creative Commons and others even existed to raise awareness of the importance of licensing and content freedom. I doubt that anyone but the lawyer who wrote the thing even has looked at it since then. Have you tried to send them feedback about it? Once again, _talk_ to people, don't just condemn what they are doing. It's exactly the same with CC 3.0 and many other issues. Your stance tends to be: "No! These people are doing bad things! We should stay away from them! Don't you dare talk to them!" My position is: If we want our ideas to spread, we need to reach out to others and _convince_ them, not condemn them, as part of the process of collaboration. And, if that process goes both ways, and people in our community are convinced that they are sometimes too militaristic about certain issues, I don't think that would be unhealthy or unhelpful at all. Yours is a position of rigid, dogmatic isolationism -- not one of open-minded, thoughtful outreach. That's regrettable, and I do not share it, and intend to continue talking to others, listening to them, and trying to reason with them instead. Wikimedia needs to go beyond navel gazing and self-paralysis; it needs to continue to reinvent itself and work with others in achieving its mission of building a global, free culture and achieving free education for all. -- Toward Peace, Love & Progress: Erik

Gregory, the problem with your position is the fundamental assumption of bad faith that runs through so many of your arguments. Whether it's Creative Commons 3.0 or a collaboration with the Archive, other organizations are always insufficiently committed to freedom and therefore impossible to collaborate with.

hoping for. It will lead to other projects which haven't spend a minute even thinking about the implications of copyright and file format policies becoming dominant, simply because they choose to adopt mainstream technology and put ease of use before anything else. It

I, too, would prefer it if these institutions would generally advocate similarly high standards of freedom as we do, and where this is not the case, I generally try to persuade them to do so.

and allies, not alienate them with a priori assumptions about their motives and their direction.

Case in point: You argue that the Archive is not a suitable partner because they are currently not supporting Theora.

If you want to effect policy changes in other organizations, you need to start talking to them!

Have you tried to send them feedback about it? Once again, _talk_ to people, don't just condemn what they are doing.

It's exactly the same with CC 3.0 and many other issues. Your stance tends to be: "No! These people are doing bad things! We should stay away from them! Don't you dare talk to them!"

That's regrettable, and I do not share it,

On 7/21/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Way to form a character assault Erik. :( At this point I think I have a right to push on these things. For video, I've been involved for ages, building actual support software, quietly pushing things along like the progress on WhatWG HTML5 standards, advocating participation. It's insulting as hell that you just trampled all over the work I've done on video, by running around totally underinformed about the efforts of people other than you and orgs other than ours. Regarding Creative Commons 3.0: I saw a draft which included the unacceptable language in December 2006. I politely pointed out the flaws in the proposed wording. Out of common courtesy I respected the confidentality of the draft, but even without that factor there was no reason for public discussion at that point. The flawed language was not included in any of the public drafts which were released later. I thought the matter was resolved. Then the license was released with the problematic language included. No one from Creative Commons has been willing to comment on the matter in an official capacity, to the best of my knowledge. It's been months since the release. Plenty of time to talk and respond. There is widespread agreement that at best the license is confusing. As far as I can tell we are easily one of the largest repositories of strongly-free content. For us it's pragmatic and business as usual to say that we won't use it until the issues are addressed, not dogmatic. Yet we are the 800-pound gorilla in some spaces today, even given the limitations we have chosen. There are many risks we face, but we must analyze them carefully and weigh them. We must treat our peers with respect, but we can not make decisions based on the friends we'll be able to claim by simply appeasing people whose goals diverge from ours. If you think that video support and cc-by-(sa)-3.0 are really our biggest risk factors, you have wildly misplaced priorities. They are both minor areas. No one in the video space is honestly competing with us in our core business space... and the overwhelming majority of CC license users are using licenses we don't accept because they are clearly incompatible with our goals. Meanwhile, other projects like CZ might actually solve the terrible quality consistency problems we have... As a reader that's what would make me switch favorite encyclopedias... not a six-month delay in accepting cc-by-*-3.0. [snip] Often what they do is perfectly right considering their goals. I don't think our business should be to persuade them. We should speak clearly about where we stand and look for commonalities. We also shouldn't walk in completely misinformed. I know you mean well, Erik, but the reality is that you have your own agenda, one which has much in common with mine, and with Wikimedia's, but I am not so foolish to think it is the same. [snip] Where did I say that anyone has a bad motive? Some people don't have the same motives that we do, that doesn't make them bad. There is more than one right answer to many problems, and neither I nor WE are so bright to have the right solutions to everything. Cite? I've given a half dozen reaons why there is no cause to host video there. So have several Wikimedians and Wikimedia employees. Are we all guilty of insulting the Archive? Indeed. Yet the board was unresponsive when I asked for permission to approach Mozilla on the matter of format support a year ago. Eventually the message that I, and Mdale, wanted to bring got brought to them through other avenues. [snip] I didn't condemn it. They are a library. It's fantastic work. It's not the same as our work. Their TOS has been raised before, but perhaps not in the right forums. And of course I'd love to talk to them about it, but your like to harbor meetings with technical projects for yourself, often holding them under the guise of your other projects... You do not invite other Wikimedia folks to attend in most cases, or even ask for input from other Wikimedia folks before these. (Easy examples being your meetings with Encyclopedia of Earth, and the recent meeting with the Internet Archive.) Don't you dare misrepresent me like that Erik. You know that is untrue. The only reason I have suggested that we reject the licenses is that they refuse to talk to us. [remove insults] I'm glad I'm different than you. I regret you can't find more polite language to discuss our differences. If your words were not just selected to spite me then you misunderstand me greatly... Perhaps I misunderstand you as well, but we aren't going to advance by hurling insults. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On 7/22/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Out of curiosity; which organisations do you feel we completely share the same values and objectives with, or which you think we should examine if we do share the same values and objectives with? That is, did you have specific organisations in mind when you wrote the above?

Hoi, You ask for examples of organisations that I had in mind when I wrote about partnering. Here are some, there are many more.

With organisation like the FSF and the Creative Commons we already have many links. Several of our people are involved with them. Organisations like these provide a global role, there are many organisations that provide a similar role on a national level. The Dutch chapter for instance is working with national organisations to make people and organisations more aware about issues like copyright and licenses. We ask for material that is currently lacking in the Dutch Wikipedia. It is the partnering of many organisations that to will make this a success.

These are many organisations we could collaborate or partner with. I do not know any organisations that we should merge with, I think this would only becomes clear when we build a working relationship. When we find that activities have an overlap that make the continued existence of activities in both organisations redundant, we could merge the activities. This might lead to a merging of organisations but this would only become clear in time.

Gregory, the problem with your position is the fundamental assumption of bad faith that runs through so many of your arguments. Whether it's Creative Commons 3.0 or a collaboration with the Archive, other organizations are always insufficiently committed to freedom and therefore impossible to collaborate with.