On 10/16/06, Roger Luethi <collector(a)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