Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw(a)users.sf.net> writes:
Wikipedia was meant to be *Free* (capital
"F") encyclopedia, and a lot of
people want it that way.
Actually, wikipedia was meant to be little more than a chalkboard for Nupedia.
Things change. It's a funny old world.
[aside]
The initial decisions were made before anyone could possibly be aware of the
repercussions. One such decision was the adoption of the GFDL, a license
designed for software documentation (that I consider horribly flawed for
pretty much anything else).
Now, we can adapt, and say
"All the original content is GFDL, but as an educational project
we're going to illustrate it with images under the Fair Use provision
(as provided by US laws), because we can legally do so and it makes the
product better"
or we can say
"Everything on *.wikipedia.org must be GFDL licensed,"
Or, as others here have noted, we can have our cake and eat it.
Keep the Fair Use photos on the US servers (good product) but mark
non-Free images and automagically maintain separate tarballs of Free and
non-Free stuff. Like Debian did for years and years...
[/aside]
If you can't live with Wikipedia being Free, find
another project.
And wikipedia-l's embarrassing metamorphosis into debian-legal continues.
You are Branden Robinson, and I claim my five pounds.
Why do you
continue to conflate Fair Use and illegality?
In Europe there isn't much difference.
Given this is a US based project, that sentence has the double
distinction of both completely untrue and utterly irrelevant.
--
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
-- W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l