[Foundation-l] Copyright issues of wikimedia projects

Tue Jun 1 09:07:49 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer (maveric149) wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Suppose that there are two free documents that I like,
>>one of which uses the GNU FDL licence, one of which uses CC-by-sa.
>>I want to combine these two free documents into a single modified one.
>>Even though both of them are supposed to be free, I can't do this!
>>But if either of these documents uses the noncopyleft CC-by instead,
>>then I am able to do what I want to do with the documents.
>>The CC-by licence is more free; it gives me more freedoms.

>Yes, but that deals with the freedom of your use, not the freedom of the
>content

The ''only'' issue in the freedom of content
is the freedom of people to ''use'' that content.
It may well be that this limitation on freedom is justified,
given the substandard world of incompatible licences
(and the even more fundamentally substandard world
where proprietary control is possible at all),
but we're only deluding ourselves if we pretend
that it's not any limitation on freedom whatsoever.

>Fixing the compatibility issue is a major problem that must be
>corrected, however.

>Correcting that is my plan A since it has the largest payoff in the end
>(a world in which the best representation of knowledge is not controllable).

I certainly agree that this plan has the largest pay off,
but I worry that your talk of "plan A" and a superlative comparison
may introduce a false dichotomy.  One may be able to pursue
both a plan A and a plan B at the same time.
In particular, there's no conflict with doing both plans
if plan B inolves:

>Using
>a license of convenience in the interim would be a bad idea since works under
>that license will not be copyleft, thus making derivative works of them
>susceptible to proprietary control.

Is this a serious issue with Wikinews?
I'm not at all convinced that it will be,
while a complicated licence like GNU FDL
has potential problems in getting used
like AP and Reuters are used by news sources.

I don't know if that problem is significant,
and we certainly don't have to decide Wikinews now.
But remember why this conversation started (this time):
the Wikimedia Foundation is supposed to have a policy
requiring that Wikimedia works be covered by a "free" licence
"like the GNU FDL".  We need to decide what "free" means here.
And the last thing that you've said about that in this thread
is that you want to use "free" in the nonstandard sense
that includes «copyleft» in addition to «free» in the sense of GNU.

I don't believe that we should rule out a priori
the possibility that a project like Wikinews might not want copyleft.
It's one thing to argue, when Wikinews policy discussions are beginning,
that it too will best be served by a copyleft licence.
It's quite another thing to insist on that as a matter of policy.
If it were up to me, I'd keep the language "free" that we have,
while clarifying that we mean in the sense of the Free Software Foundation,
nothing more.

-- Toby