[Commons-l] Dream a little...

Sun Oct 15 16:39:11 UTC 2006

On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
>
> Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives?

> Be bold,
*Wikimedia logos

> be specific,
*good OCR software
*good translation software
*good video editing software
*building codes and other "copyrighted laws"
*http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm

> be general,
*software
*State government works
*photos of people (living and dead)
*maps and satellite photos
*childrens books
*fiction

> brainstorm,
*myspace
*Everything2
*YouTube
*usenet

> have fun with it.
*OSX

My top choice would be media-related software tools for which there
just aren't good free software alternatives (but there are good
non-free software tools out there).  OCR, translation, and video
editing are three areas I can think of.  Even $100 million isn't
enough to put more than a dent in the useful proprietary works out
there.

Anthony