[Foundation-l] Creative Commons publishes report on defining "Non-commercial", Is Wikpedia non commercial?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 12:55 PM, jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com
<jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> I would like a professional opinion on the question :
> Better stated, I would like your opinion on this, if it is not off topic.
>>    Is wikipedia non commercial or commercial non profit?
> Is working on the wikipedia more like a commercial non profit work and
> not really non commecial in terms of the microsoft licenses quoted.

Thank you for revising your question.

(1) As with many things: The question with the greatest impact is:
Does anyone care?   There are a lot of questions which are very hard
to clearly answer but which do not create problems simply because no
one cares.  I've never heard of a major software company hauling
someone to court over a non-commercial/educational use license, and
while it's probably happened I doubt it's a frequent occurrence.

(2) The actual answer to your question depends on the definition of
"non-commercial" in the particular license. If non-commercial isn't
clearly defined for the purpose of the license then the question is
unanswerable, and the user is at their own risk. I'm doubtful that any
two commercial software vendors achieves a "non-comercial use only"
restriction in the same way.

(3) Another way of looking at this is this—  By our own rules,
materials submitted to Wikipedia must be freely licensed for all kinds
of use, including clearly commercial ones.  If a "non-commercial use
only" software license permitted use for Wikipedia then it would be
possible to launder works through Wikipedia in order to make them
available for commercial use.  This would probably not be a desired
effect, but it may be the common reality; see (1).

(4) If some of our own users are violating their licenses while
contributing, thats unfortunate but it's a risk that they've
personally chosen to take which we can't control. From this
perspective the non-commercial issue is, at worse, little different
from using completely unlicensed software... also something we can't
control.

(5) Of course, many people in the Wikipedia communities recommend
users use Free Software and our project pages reflect these
recommendations.  Free Software enables the collaboration and
cooperation which are essential to the Wikimedia projects, avoids
complicated software license permission concerns, and supports the
openness and transparency which should be common to good scholarship.

Considering (4) and (5), this is basically off-topic... To the (almost
non-existent) extent that we have any effective policy at all on
software that our users use it is to recommend that they use Free
Software; we can't know how users software is licensed;  any license
violation by a user that did exist would be their issue rather than
ours.

Cheers,