[Foundation-l] Mywikipediaspace

[daniwo59 at aol.com]

But what if that hypothetical hotel chain wrote an article about their  hotel 
in the area, complete with amenities, prices for rooms, and a phone number  
for booking. Would that be worthy of inclusion?
 
In a message dated 10/2/2006 4:49:33 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
lars at aronsson.se writes:

daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> I am currently reading the Terms of  Service of Myspace. [...]
> Forbidden thing 11 is:
> displaying an  advertisement on your profile, or accepting 
> payment or anything of  value from a third person in exchange for 
> your performing any  commercial activity on or through the 
> MySpace Services on behalf of  that person,

The Wikipedia community's background in free software is  different 
from this.  The reason why you cannot use your personal  Myspace 
account for selling advertising is not that Myspace wants to be  
ad-free, but because Myspace wants to sell that advertising  
themselves.  On the other hand, if some company wants some  
functionality added to Linux or to the Mediawiki software (for  
example, to adopt to the company's file format or hardware), they 
are  free to pay somebody to do this, and release the modifications 
under the  same GPL license.

If a hotel chain wants to promote tourism in their  area, they are 
(and should be) free to pay somebody to write good articles  for 
Wikipedia about places, sights and monuments in that area.  Of  
course, the articles must be NPOV and contain verifiable facts,  
describe notable objects, the contents must not violate any 
copyrights  and it must be released under the GFDL.  But the 
commercial purpose  is not forbidden, and the WMF doesn't need a 
cut from the money that went  into the authoring of this contents.

If the hotel chain went and talked  to Myspace, I assume that 
Myspace could allow them to set up a  non-personal (commercial) 
account for a fee with different terms of  service.  I don't use 
Myspace and I don't know if they sell such  accounts, but I guess 
it could be a good business to do so.


--  
Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -  http://aronsson.se
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