On Sat, 2003-03-01 at 18:21, Axel Boldt wrote:
Concretely, the guy who is writing or contributing to a science textbook under a license that prohibits commercial distribution, or doesn't require authorship acknowledgements, or doesn't allow invariant sections, or allows modifications without changing the title etc. etc. does not get anything out of Wikipedia. No intellectual property rights for this dude.
This hypothetical dude remains free to republish and release derivative works of the GFDL material under the GFDL. He can run a handsome side business printing and selling GFDL'd textbooks with Wikipedia material if he likes.
However, if he wants to publish GFDL'd material under a different license (which does not provide the same guarantees to the next set of users that he enjoys), he needs the explicit permission of the copyright holder(s). So no, without that (which may be difficult to get on a project like Wikipedia where there are many anonymous contributors) he can't use it in his non-free, business-hating, anti-author science textbook. ;)
So Encyclopedia Britannica sucks in the Wikipedia contents, locks them up and improves upon them. Does that hurt me in any way? Or anybody else for that matter? I still have precisely the same amount of freedom I had before they decided to to that. Wikipedia is still free. If anything, I benefit because more people get to read my material and I get to read Britannica's improvements.
Read, yes. Republish and further improve upon, no.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)