[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little...

Tue Oct 17 01:47:42 UTC 2006

Roger Luethi wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Oct 2006 16:13:36 -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>> Well the point is not an unrestricted gift, though that is fun to think 
>> about too.  The point is not political lobbying, though that is fun to 
>> think about too. :-)
>>
>> The point is: suppose someone wanted to buy $100,000,000 of existing 
>> copyrighted material and set it free.  What should it be?
> 
> 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

   Also something I have not seen on this thread yet, which this comes 
close to, is the lobbying power of this having a significant positive 
impact.  Wikipedia itself is a powerful example of what good open can do 
and politicians and voters do notice.

   With that in mind I think the textbook suggestions or the language 
learning suggestions are among the best.  It also works better for the 
donor to be able to see "look what impact this $100 million had".  Quite 
aside from the good press for the donor it also leads directly to 
thinking about how the commons is a good thing, a good thing that laws 
should be more friendly towards.

SKL