I may be committing blasphemy here, but how much is Wikipedia 'married' to the GNU/FDL? The reason I'm asking is that I recently wanted to download a picture of the signing of the Treaty of Rome from the EU website. Only after I did so, I found that the pictures can be copied only for non-commercial purposes. And while Wikipedia itself would fall under that heading, the GNU/FDL does not forbid commercial use. And it's not the first time I've had that problem with texts or pictures either. The GNU/FDL allows a lot, which is good on itself, but also means that we cannot use any material under stricter copyleft restrictions.
Is there a way around this problem? Is there a way to put such material in Wikipedia without getting in these license difficulties? If not, could it perhaps be made possible to set it up so? For example, by not having the pages themselves fall under the GNU/FDL, but some modified version where certain explicitly specified material is left out (the default being that there is no such material)?
Andre Engels
On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 12:58:10PM +0100, Andre Engels wrote:
Is there a way around this problem? Is there a way to put such material in Wikipedia without getting in these license difficulties? If not, could it perhaps be made possible to set it up so? For example, by not having the pages themselves fall under the GNU/FDL, but some modified version where certain explicitly specified material is left out (the default being that there is no such material)?
[[nonfree:Treaty of Rome]] -> http://nonfree.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Rome
?
Andre Engels wrote:
I may be committing blasphemy here, but how much is Wikipedia 'married' to the GNU/FDL? The reason I'm asking is that I recently wanted to download a picture of the signing of the Treaty of Rome from the EU website. Only after I did so, I found that the pictures can be copied only for non-commercial purposes. And while Wikipedia itself would fall under that heading, the GNU/FDL does not forbid commercial use. And it's not the first time I've had that problem with texts or pictures either. The GNU/FDL allows a lot, which is good on itself, but also means that we cannot use any material under stricter copyleft restrictions.
I am open to thoughtful explorations along these lines, but I think that we're pretty 'married' to GNU/FDL. The viral nature of the license makes it pretty impossible at this point to do anything about nagging issues like this.
At the same time, though, I like the fact that there is no prohibition on commercial uses of the Wikipedia. Given my ultimate goal that there be a free encyclopedia distributed at extremely low cost to every person on the planet, permitting _nonproprietary_ commercial use (as GNU/FDL does) is pretty important.
Someday a clever entrepreneur in, say, India, will realize that although it's not possible to price Britannica/Encarta or a locally produced conventional encyclopedia at a price point for the masses, it *is* possible to price a derived version of Wikipedia that way.
--Jimbo
I think we should add some text to our file upload page and to our Copyrights page, regarding the source code of graphics/images.
I'm talking about graphics/images that were created by a program based on some textual input. Examples are images created by raytracers like POV-Ray, graphs of functions created with octave, mathematical illustrations created with Maple, 3-d pictures of molecules created with rasmol etc. Basically, any image/graphic that was not created by somebody painting with a mouse on the screen, but by feeding some text into a program.
(The same would also apply to midi sound files that were automatically created from music scores.)
The GFDL insists that a "transparent copy [...] that is suitable for revising the document straightforwardly" be made available to all users. While the GFDL explicitly lists png as an admissable transparent format, I don't think this follows the spirit of "transparent" for these types of images. The GPL uses a definition which clearly rules out png's in these cases: "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
So one could make a case that the the spirit of the GFDL requires that the source text of images be made available. In any case, I think it is important for Wiki purposes to have source code available, to facilitate modification of all content. We should simply tell uploaders to list the software and source text they used on the image description page.
Axel
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I just uploaded a test script, not even thinking it would let me. Although the script didn't run for some reason(why is that? I'd like to implement it on my own server) isn't this still a possible security breech? The ability to upload .php files should be stopped during script execution. I couldn't figure out how to delete the file either... http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3ATest.php
--------------------------------------------------- Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik Seriously! Owner & Director of Operations http://www.seriouszone.com
On mar, 2003-01-14 at 17:31, Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik wrote:
I just uploaded a test script, not even thinking it would let me. Although the script didn't run for some reason(why is that? I'd like to implement it on my own server)
Only the /w/ and /tools/ subdirectories have the PHP filter enabled in the Apache configuration, and you can't upload to them. So, you just get to download the source.
isn't this still a possible security breech? The ability to upload .php files should be stopped during script execution.
Arbitrary HTML file uploads are potentially much more dangerous than a PHP file that your browser is going to load as plaintext.
I couldn't figure out how to delete the file either... http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image%3ATest.php
Seems to be already deleted.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Speaking of security: Is there an upper limit to the size of files (especially pictures) that can be uploaded? Because of the increasing traffic at Wikipedia and the fact that pictures drastically increase the size of a page (meaning that popular pages with graphics will increase traffic on the server), I would hypothesize that image files over 50K in size probably aren't necessary.
-- First Online Church of "Bob" http://www.modemac.com/
Something that I've tried to avoid since coming on board Wikipedia in February 2001. Could I be made a sysop for Wiktionary; I can still do without it for Wikipedia. Since I joined Wiktionary on day-1 I'm finding that there is a need to be able to cull some of the experimental pages which have built up.
Ray (Eclecticology)
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org