[Wikipedia-l] Re: Conference report from South Africa

[Jimmy Wales]

Timwi wrote:
> This is assuming that the larger part of the cost of textbooks is
> copyright licenses. I would imagine that it is instead the production
> costs of actual books, and obviously free content won't help that.

I agree that it would be very helpful to us to have a better
understanding of the tradeoffs but I also wanted to point out that it's
a bit more complex than just copyright license + cost of production here.

Our work is free-as-in-beer but also free-as-in-speech.  So the point is
not _just_ that a potential producer of paper texts saves on the cost of
copyright licensing but also....

1. They don't need to get permission from anyone at all, they can just
get started in any small and tiny way they see fit (or in any large and
mass-produced way they see fit)

2. There can be many competitors in a market ecosystem of provision of
content, rather than a single licensee attempting to capture some
monopoly rents

--Jimbo