[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[Sam Johnston]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 10:05 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 7:18 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > My view is that any restriction of distribution that is not absolutely
> > and unquestionably legally  necessary is a violation of the moral
> > rights of the contributors. We contributed to a free encyclopedia, in
> > the sense that the material could be used freely--and widely. We all
> > explicitly agreed there could be commercial use, and most of us did
> > not particularly concern ourselves with how other commercial or
> > noncommercial sites would use or license the material, as long as what
> > we put on Wikipedia could be used by anyone.
>

Well said - I couldn't agree more.


> Personally, I care whether or not reusers attempt to follow the spirit of
> the copyleft and make their changes and contributions available for future
> reuse.


You're mixing issues - nobody has a problem with 'follow[ing] the spirit of
the copyleft', it's making them jump through arbitrary hoops to do so that
is the problem.


> If we wanted to be truly free, we would all license our work into the
> public domain, but instead we work under a copyleft and I consider honoring
> that distinction to be important.
>

Nobody is suggesting otherwise. There are plenty of good reasons not to use
public domain and I for one certainly value the 'protection' of CC-BY-SA
without the 'exclusion' of detailed (yet meaningless) attributions.

Sam