No subject

is a license I have affinity with. I am sure that the average Wikimedian
does not think highly of CC-by-nd or an all reserved copyright statement.
Consequently, the only Knols that might be of interest to us are the once
with a more permissive license that our own. We can make use of their
content, but I do not think that it is likely to happen that much.

As it has been said often enough, our license is not compatible with the
license allowed by Google for the Knols. Consequently it is for the authors
of articles that end up as a Knol to indicate that this is not allowed.

Those people who care too much about all the fine points of licenses will
continue to make their finer points. In the mean time, I am happy that there
is another initiative that tries to inform people.
Thanks,
         GeardM



On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 10:01 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I know the following is not the current situation, but:
> >
> > The only thing we have any real reason to insist on for Wikipedia
> > content is attribution, and the only attribution that should be
> > necessary is attribution to Wikipedia with a link to where exactly it
> > was taken.
> >
> > Everything we do beyond this is a practical restriction on the use of
> > our content. Rather than making it free in any real sense of the word
> > except the artificiality of copyleft, it makes it less free. Freedom
> > with respect to intellectual property is the opportunity to take
> > intellectual content and do what you will with it. Free material is
> > material you can us for your own purposes, whatever they may be. (and
> > I point out that putting restrictive licenses on something and
> > republishing it does not destroy the underlying freedom; you can claim
> > what copyright you want to claim, but it doesn't mean you have it.
> > People do this with PD US government material routinely.)
> >
> > I seriously doubt any contributor of Wikipedia text content really
> > cares about individual attribution to his individual contribution. How
> > could they, given that we permit any modification whatever, and the
> > contribution will in most cases be entangled hopeless in hundreds of
> > others. When you read the disclaimer, you know that you are leaving it
> > open to be twisted in any manner whatsoever and used for purposes
> > completely alien to yours. Sometimes I care that people preserve the
> > attribution to me personally of something I write--in those cases I
> > write for a more convention medium--and will usually ask not just BY,
> > but NC. Most people care about those two concepts--they write for
> > reputation, and if there's any money, they want some of it. But not
> > when they write for Wikipedia. There's no money, and your contribution
> > will be to the encyclopedia as a whole. Yes, some people say that they
> > wrote certain articles, but the most they can really say is that they
> > started them or wrote some of what remains in the content.  You get no
> > reputation from writing scattered sentences.
> >
> > Illustrations I am told may be different. sounds reasonable--they
> > carry individual licensing statements--though again I am puzzled,
> > because they are open to any editing whatever. If a photographer
> > contributes his art, he lets us distort it. The version he
> > contributed, though, is still there.
> >
> > There is a real point in advocating copyleft to change the world to
> > the use of free content; I fully understand the desire to change the
> > world to the merits of "libre" publishing.  But maintaining it in
> > Wikipedia is  pointy--wp is there as an encyclopedia to be used, and
> > the very thought that one could not take text and put it wherever you
> > please is completely opposite to the spirit of contribution. Its the
> > zealots and their legal ingenuity triumphing over commonsense and the
> > need to actually provide a free encyclopedia in the way ordinary
> > people mean "free".  They're using the technicalities of their
> > licenses to restrict content if other  people want to use differently
> > from the way they had in mind when they thought about how to develop
> > non-commercial software. A brilliant innovation--but it should not
> > apply to us.
> >
> > NYBrad show the right way a good lawyer approaches things: decide what
> > we want to do, and find a legal way of doing it.  I'm not one, but I
> > think  the easiest legal way is to change our license to the freest
> > possible, and give people the right to ask that the content they
> > contributed under another assumption be withdrawn and their text
> > rewritten. If we need to rewrite two paragraphs a year, which is what
> > i expect, i hereby offer to do it.
> >
> > On 7/31/08, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> In an unrelated comment, some people were wondering *why* Google is
> >>> giving such limited license choices.  I don't know for sure, of
> >>> course, and I don't think they'll give a straight answer, but one
> >>> possibility is that they're worried about the implications ShareAlike
> >>> licenses would have on embedded ads.
> >>
> >> Unless they're worried about reusers having embedded ads, I don't see
> >> a problem - Google require you to grant them a pretty wide ranging
> >> license in addition to whatever you give the public.
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
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> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> > David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
> >
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> >
>
> I think, however, that the distinction is more than artificial. When I
> write code, for example, I license it under GPL, not BSD. My choice in
> this matter is deliberate-I don't want my code used in closed source
> software. I expect that anyone who takes advantage of my offer to
> share my code will in turn share theirs. The GPL enforces this, other
> licenses may not, so I pick it for that exact reason. It is not, to
> me, a triviality or a technicality.
>
> On the other hand, I -personally- agree with you about free knowledge,
> and so I personally choose to license my contributions to Wikipedia as
> public domain (and have an explicit statement on my user page of my
> intent to do so). However, other contributors who contribute to
> articles may have a very real expectation that their contributions are
> under the GFDL, and that the viral share-alike requirements of the
> GFDL will be followed by reusers. I imagine that to at least a
> significant portion of these contributors, the GFDL requirements are
> similarly not artificial or technicalities, they are core expectations
> that these people had when they chose to contribute to Wikipedia. "I'm
> happy to share my knowledge with you, but if you reuse my work, I
> expect you to similarly share what you made with it, and to make sure
> that any reuses from there are also shared" is the exact expectation
> of the GFDL. That expectation of those who contributed in good faith
> under it should not be dismissed as light or trivial, and it certainly
> should not be denigrated as anti-free when it is the exact opposite.
>
> --
> Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.
>
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