Tomasz Wegrzanowski taw@users.sf.net writes:
Wikipedia was meant to be *Free* (capital "F") encyclopedia, and a lot of people want it that way.
Actually, wikipedia was meant to be little more than a chalkboard for Nupedia. Things change. It's a funny old world.
[aside] The initial decisions were made before anyone could possibly be aware of the repercussions. One such decision was the adoption of the GFDL, a license designed for software documentation (that I consider horribly flawed for pretty much anything else).
Now, we can adapt, and say "All the original content is GFDL, but as an educational project we're going to illustrate it with images under the Fair Use provision (as provided by US laws), because we can legally do so and it makes the product better"
or we can say "Everything on *.wikipedia.org must be GFDL licensed,"
Or, as others here have noted, we can have our cake and eat it. Keep the Fair Use photos on the US servers (good product) but mark non-Free images and automagically maintain separate tarballs of Free and non-Free stuff. Like Debian did for years and years... [/aside]
If you can't live with Wikipedia being Free, find another project.
And wikipedia-l's embarrassing metamorphosis into debian-legal continues.
You are Branden Robinson, and I claim my five pounds.
Why do you continue to conflate Fair Use and illegality?
In Europe there isn't much difference.
Given this is a US based project, that sentence has the double distinction of both completely untrue and utterly irrelevant.