[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

Thu Feb 19 19:32:46 UTC 2004

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 07:15:10PM +0000, Gareth Owen wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> writes:
> > Wikipedia was meant to be *Free* (capital "F") encyclopedia, and a lot of
> > people want it that way.
>
> 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]

In Debian there is very clear separation between free and non-free software.
The free software can not rely in any way on non-free (except for the
contrib stuff). This solution is fine. So let's create nonfree.wikipedia.org,
where people can upload anything they want, and keep normal Wikipedia completely free.

> > > 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.

Wikipedia is NOT an US project. It's international project meant to be
useful worldwide. It's really irrelevant where the servers are.