geni wrote:
On 1/13/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
Absolutely, there's lots of reasons, but the
reasons should be there on
an item by item basis. Do we need to indiscriminately host their entire
corpus of maps when we only have use for a few?
There are very few things we need to do. In this case the reason is why not?
IOW you support indiscriminate inclusio. The action of The Borg is
justifiec because it is gentler than that of The Daleks.
We all love to
hate M*******t,
partly because it dominates its
industry.
Plently of other industries have been dominated to the same degree
without the same level of disslike.
Perhaps I should be asking for examples. Then I can probably find
evidence that contradicts those examples. Such a process would be of
little value because that would be _other_ industries. Ethics cannot be
guided by weighing the actions of others to see haw many are roght and
how many are wrong.
We need to be
conscious of not becoming resentfully referred
to as W*******a because of our dominance.
Nah people will find plently of other reasons to disslike us. They already do.
You want them to have more?
I think that
it's important
to view ourselves as a part of a community of websites developing free
access to information. That requires maintaining the respect of other
members of that community, and you don't do that by raiding their
efforts.
How many flicker images do we have these days anyway. One of the
common values of provideing free stuff is seeing it reused.
That's true enough, but we aren't copying the entire corpus of flickr
material. We use it when there is a reason to use it.
The survival of
a vision depends on sharing that vision, and
that cannot happen if our allied co-visionaries are put in a position
where they need to defend their efforts from the superpower on the block.
Why would they need to do that? What do people lose by haveing their
material on wikimedia projects?
You see a key part of the vission of free material is that others will
use it. There are probably near 1000 sites that use large chunks of
wikimedia material.
Some do so ethically, and some don't. Whether any of them are acting
legally would be a different question. The loss that the original host
may suffer is an intangible one. We strip them of their
competitiveness. When they produce material, and we scoop it all we are
telling them that their effort is not important. We care only about
their end result. This strikes me as a powerful disincentive to further
efforts on their part. A major university is more likely to take that
in stride than an individual who has poured his heart into his efforts.
One common practice that I have observed in the software industry (and
others as well) is the tendency to let the little guy expend the risk
capital needed to bring an idea into reality. If the idea fails it's
his loss. If the idea succeeds Big Co. can pay handsomely for the
results to insure that it does not have to deal with this innovator as a
competitor. This process saves Big Co. the need to fund risky ventures.
We are not offering payouts. But we need the little collaborator as
much as he needs us. His survival is an integral part of our mission.
Following a policy of taking just because the law says that we have that
right is not the way to build a collaborative environment.
Ethical
considerations rest upon forseeing the consequences of one's own
actions. Ethics are not governed by rules and laws, nor are they
imposed through fear of arbitrary punishment. Ethics involves a
willingness to be at a disadvantage when it is the right thing to do.
That would really rather depend on the system of ethics. Calling your
morality an ethical system does not make it so.
You confuse morality and ethics. Circumscribing ethics into a "system"
imposes an undue restriction on them.
Ec