[Foundation-l] Knol: on the bright side of things...

[Marco Chiesa]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 9:47 AM, Massimiliano <m.lincetto a gmail.com> wrote:

> I still don't understand why we should reject the copyleft philosophy and
> change to an attribution  license. I think that our mission is not only to
> provide free information and knowledge, but also to be sure that it will be
> kept free.
> I don't think that we should change our licensing policies in order to be
> published on Google Knol: why we should do it? If Knols wants to allow its
> users to publish Wikipedia-derivative content they should change their
> terms, IMHO.
>
>
I think giving up copyleft only to be reusable by a big guy like Knol would
sign the death of copyleft. It is a rather different situation compared to
using a small part of a Wikipedia article without having to release the
whole content under copyleft - particularly with the mammoth clause of
putting the whole letter of GFDL.
There are endless discussions about which licence between cc-by or
cc-by-sa is freer. I believe that at the moment there is little improvement
of the content of Wikipedia done outside Wikipedia, so whether this is
freely licensed (what would be imposed by -sa) or copyrighted is not that
relevant on a practical point of view. If people will create new content
with derivatives of Knol and will copyright it, than the point of copyleft
will be more clear (and people may debate whether copyleft is an obstacle to
the creation of knowledge).

Cruccone