On Monday 10 January 2005 16:51, John Lee wrote:
Instead, we make all edits by anons and new users
after a certain date
dual-licensed under the GFDL and the CC-by-sa (or some other preferable)
license. Sure, this does not solve anything in the short run. However,
the point is, eventually, some time far far away in the future,
everything on Wikipedia can be assurably be useable under both the
CC-by-sa and GFDL licenses. Whether we want to then switch solely to the
CC-by-sa or stick with the dual-license is not a decision for now.
In our wikiprojects at
http://www.wikinerds.org and especially at
http://www.nerdypc.org we use both the GFDL and the CC-BY-SA2 with great
success (we have received positive comments from users). We even allow
anybody to choose what licensing terms they want for their articles. We
understand that many people have strong opinions about licenses and we dont
really want to force them to use any single license. we believe that we can
educate them to choose the best lic for their work so we allow them to choose
within a set of approved licenses. this means that every single page of our
wikis may have different licensing. we consider this good because we praise
the individuality of every member of
Wikinerds.org and we want to allow them
to express their character fully, even through their license of choice.
beware of the following paragraphcontains some wikipedia-related "rant",
don't
read it if you dont like and proceed to the next paragraph.
(rant)
In contrast, it my opinion that
Wikipedia.org is collectivistic since does not
accept signed articles, author bios, different licenses, etc. thus, IMO,
wikipedia is oppressive to individualistic character traits or anything that
is different than the usual group think and practices of the community - how
many users have been labelled trolls recently without good reason in
wikipedia.org? Nevertheless, I do recognise that WP has done lots of good
work on the Net and this is amazing (but u can do more if u listen to
external evaluators - not members of the group think - and change policies).
(/rant)
At
Wikinerds.org we believe that we have found the best balance between
individualism and the community. we have even set up a special experimental
wiki at
http://jnana.wikinerds.org/ where individual freedom is guaranteed
and anything that is legal and does not cause any nuisance to me or to other
users is permitted!
I think dual-licensing under gfdl and cc is great practice, as long as the
sharealike parameter of cc is used and enforced.
I have asked this question when I met RMS this summer (at a speech): Is
dual-licensing good or bad? (between gpl and another lic). He said it depends
on the other license. (everything after this notice are my ideas - not rms')
I interpreted it as a reference to copyleft: if the other license allows
sublicensing (like bsd) then it hindersthe purpose of gpl, but if the other
license is just another copyleft pool, then theres no prob with that IMO.
However I would object any movement for CC-only licensing in wikipedia. I
think gfdl is the license of choice when it comes to large texts which need
effective copyleft protection. please dont abandon gfdl.
some ppl disagree with fsf politics so they prefer cc to gfdl/gpl. but there
is no good reason to avoid fsf, except if your salary comes from that
monopoly in the city starting with the word R :) if you haven't met rms I
suggest you to go to some speech and discuss with him (if he has time for u).
it is true that many people dont like him, but it it my belief that this is
not because of his ideas but because of his activism style. but even if you
dont like his style, you should accept that he does good work and really
helped very much with the softpatent problem here in EU.
This message does not contain any legal advice and I have no special knowledge
of law (IANAL). Statements made about other persons or projects in this
message reflect only my personal beliefs and perceptions of the discussed
persons or projects. The reader is asked to check the facts and not rely only
on beliefs ([[Baconian method]]).
(sorry for any mispellings etc but i was writting quickly and have no time to
check and fix the msg now.)
--
NSK
Come to see the new wikiprojects at
http://portal.wikinerds.org