[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

Fri Feb 20 14:56:20 UTC 2004

Gareth Owen wrote:
> Actually, wikipedia was meant to be little more than a chalkboard
> for Nupedia.  Things change.  It's a funny old world.

Yes, but my goal from the very beginning has always been Free with a
capital F.  That applied to Nupedia as well as Wikipedia.

I'm sympathetic to the concerns you've been raising, but I'm not
convinced that there's tension between "making a great encyclopedia"
and "making a GNU-free encyclopedia".

That is, I don't think refusing images under a non-free license and
being extremely cautious about "fair use" means that we will have less
images *in the long run*.  We just have to be creative and
enterpreneurial and energetic -- all of which we excel at.

The tension is between "convenience" and "freedom".  It's convenient
to use Microsoft Windows.  It's freedom-promoting to use GNU/Linux.

--Jimbo

p.s.  Anyone who says that the GNU FDL is problematic in its current
form will get no argument from me.  I don't agree with some of the
criticisms of the license, but I do think that it's needlessly
specific and should be simplified and generalized.  It was written for
the purpose of software documentation, and clearly contemplated a
number of authors and a "history" much shorter than what we have.

I have great optimism, though, that the license will be tuned and
improved in the future.  RMS has indicated interest in helping us with
that.  