[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Tue Oct 17 01:10:19 UTC 2006

On 10/16/06, Roger Luethi <collector at hellgate.ch> wrote:
> Dreaming a little to the tune of $100,000,000 but with restrictions is
> hard, especially knowing that there is a real possibility that such a
> project may do more harm than good.
>
> But here is my restriction-compliant dream:
>
> I wonder if content acquired within the restrictions you mentioned (pick
> any of the good suggestions made by others) could be used as a lever in
> some dual-licensing scheme (as used by several major open source software
> companies). As long as the content is under a free license but not in the
> public domain (e.g. GFDL or CC-BY-SA), we'd have a bargaining chip that we
> could parlay into access to other works. -- We can't do that for Wikipedia
> itself (because there is no single copyright owner), but if we owned a
> significant piece of desirable content, things might be different.
>
> Roger

Roger, could you expand on this? I'm not following how it works. I
understand that dual-licensing works for software because companies
may not want to copyleft their work, and because just source code
isn't actually all that useful minus maintenance and support and
documentation and other things that companies like Redhat provide for
money, but how does this apply to regular old content? Is the GFDL as
'viral' as the GPL in regard to modification and incorporation, and is
not being GFDL valuable enough to various parties that the relevant
corporations would still realize their desired sums?

--Gwern