Gareth Owen wrote:
Actually, wikipedia was meant to be little more than a chalkboard for Nupedia. Things change. It's a funny old world.
Yes, but my goal from the very beginning has always been Free with a capital F. That applied to Nupedia as well as Wikipedia.
I'm sympathetic to the concerns you've been raising, but I'm not convinced that there's tension between "making a great encyclopedia" and "making a GNU-free encyclopedia".
That is, I don't think refusing images under a non-free license and being extremely cautious about "fair use" means that we will have less images *in the long run*. We just have to be creative and enterpreneurial and energetic -- all of which we excel at.
The tension is between "convenience" and "freedom". It's convenient to use Microsoft Windows. It's freedom-promoting to use GNU/Linux.
--Jimbo
p.s. Anyone who says that the GNU FDL is problematic in its current form will get no argument from me. I don't agree with some of the criticisms of the license, but I do think that it's needlessly specific and should be simplified and generalized. It was written for the purpose of software documentation, and clearly contemplated a number of authors and a "history" much shorter than what we have.
I have great optimism, though, that the license will be tuned and improved in the future. RMS has indicated interest in helping us with that.