> Perhaps the most important thing of all would be
license
compatibility. They say that they will have a "free license" --
it it
is GNU FDL, that's great. If it's something else, well, things can
get very complicated as far as reuse goes. <<
In the month of February we will finalize the license issues, probably GNU FDL
will be chosed.
> When it comes to copyright, the real problem is
not going to be with
people who put copyrighted material into an on-line
encyclopedia.
That's easily removed as soon as it's recognized. It's going to be
with people who try to claim personal copyrights on openly licensed or
even public domain material. <<
Public domain material is by definition uncopyrighted. People can not, by
definition, claim personal copyrights on public domain materials. At best,
they can argue whether a certain material is in public domain or not.
Personal copyrights on openly licensed material is not something new. If I
create a material and publish it under the GNU FDL license, I still have
copyright on it and I'm free to distribute it under any other license that I
choose to. People will be able to use my material according to the GNU FDL,
or select the alternative licenses that I offer to them.
This is the way the Mozilla project (
http://mozilla.org ) works, by allowing
their code to be distributed both under GPL and MPL licenses.
> There is a copyright notice on the bottom of each
page. <<
That will be debated in the month of February, like specified above. Right
now, it means that anybody contributing to the Open-site project agrees to
its distribution license, while still retaining the copyright of their
submissions. The words "Open-site" refer in that particular instance to the
Open-site contributors.
The Internet community can use content in the Open-site project according to
its license (probably GNU GPL), but authors of the original content can still
use the material at their discretion.
> They are younger project, and I see nothing in
there about how they
would handle such issues as NPOV and vandalism. <<
Senior editors at the project have discretion regarding editorial account
removal.
Thanks,
Vlad.