Mike Finucane wrote:
The only objection I have is to allowing others to
make profits from my
work. That definition of freedom isnt in my dictionary.
Mike, there are probably dimensions to this which you have not considered.
Right now, African schools (for example) suffer under a situation in
which proprietary textbooks generate absurd profits for publishers who
keep prices high. They therefore cannot afford new up-to-date textbooks
and generally go without or use very old used textbooks.
A non-commercial-only license does not help them nearly as much as a
free license, because a free license makes possible a competitive
marketplace. Enterpreneurs can find an opportunity in taking your
freely licensed photos and freely licensed
wikipedia/wikibooks/wiktionary/etc. content and building it into
something useful, at a *far lower cost*.
If you think it's dishonorable to make money by providing a useful
service in a non-proprietary way, then of course we'll never agree.
But it sounds to me like what you are opposed to is not *profit* per se,
but *locking things up*. If you said, "I don't want to contribute my
work to the commons if that means that some company can make a
proprietary version and not give any changes they make back to the
community" then I would agree with you completely: this is why I like
copyleft.
--Jimbo