Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Apparently you could clear it up for me then.
Sure, glad to help. I won't be saying anything new, though.
Should a free encyclopedia be redistributable by anyone in every country, or only the United States, or need it not be redistributable at all?
It should be as widely redistributable as is practical. Due to differences in jurisdiction, there can be difficulties associated with this. We must not bend our NPOV/encyclopedia policies to conform to censorship, for example, but we can try as hard as we can to accomodate minor differences in copyright laws.
Should it be free for commercial redistribution?
Yes.
Does the entire encyclopedia need to be editable? What types of edits must be allowed? Can there be centralized control, for instance linkback requirements?
None of these questions have anything at all to do with the question of GNU-freedom. These are internal policies of administration, and we have pretty well-developed answers for all of them, right?
All this talk of whether or not things are "free enough" led me to believe that there was a lot of grey area. Maybe I'm wrong, and we do agree on what it means to be a free encyclopedia, we just haven't agreed that we want to be a free encyclopedia.
With all due respect, Anthony, I think you're just trolling here.
We know what it means to be a free encyclopedia, and we draw on longstanding traditions in the free software community to flesh out the details of that meaning. We have been committed from day one (day one of Nupedia, even) to be a free encyclopedia in the sense of GNU-freedom.
We *do* have ongoing discussions about particular details, and we will *always* have those discussions. Some of these issues are complex, and the answers to them are not always going to be obvious.
Acting as if there's some deep philosophical division within the project, or some less-than-complete commitment to freedom is an insult to many of us who have been working so hard for so long to achieve exactly that.
--Jimbo