dmehkeri(a)swi.com wrote:
digging, it does seem to be disallowed. For rationale,
I get pointed back to
either Jimbo's posts on disallowing non-commercial-use media licenses, fair use,
or discussion of downstream use.
None of these reasons seem to apply here. For the free encyclopedia, a CC-BY-ND
media license, for example, is perfectly redistributable, allows for possible
commercial use, and poses no issues for forks or other downstream use, right?
When we talk about Wikipedia being free, we refer to the 4 freedoms of
free software, as defined by Richard Stallman many years ago:
0. The freedom to copy
1. The freedom to redistribute
2. The freedom to modify
3. The freedom to redistribute modified versions
CC-BY-NC violates at least the last of these.
Why do we care? Because we want people to be able to adapt our work for
their own purposes. It is difficult for us to foresee what those
purposes might be.
Perhaps an artist wants to create a Digital Dream Booth... you walk into
it, and say some concept like "Iraq" and dozens of images drawn from
Wikipedia, interspersed with snippets of text, cascade down around you
dissolving and forming in unusual ways. The images are digitally
morphed, one into the next.
This is clearly going to involve making derivative works of our images.
--Jimbo