On 10/16/06, Roger Luethi collector@hellgate.ch wrote:
Dreaming a little to the tune of $100,000,000 but with restrictions is hard, especially knowing that there is a real possibility that such a project may do more harm than good.
But here is my restriction-compliant dream:
I wonder if content acquired within the restrictions you mentioned (pick any of the good suggestions made by others) could be used as a lever in some dual-licensing scheme (as used by several major open source software companies). As long as the content is under a free license but not in the public domain (e.g. GFDL or CC-BY-SA), we'd have a bargaining chip that we could parlay into access to other works. -- We can't do that for Wikipedia itself (because there is no single copyright owner), but if we owned a significant piece of desirable content, things might be different.
Roger
Roger, could you expand on this? I'm not following how it works. I understand that dual-licensing works for software because companies may not want to copyleft their work, and because just source code isn't actually all that useful minus maintenance and support and documentation and other things that companies like Redhat provide for money, but how does this apply to regular old content? Is the GFDL as 'viral' as the GPL in regard to modification and incorporation, and is not being GFDL valuable enough to various parties that the relevant corporations would still realize their desired sums?
--Gwern