[Foundation-l] Mywikipediaspace

Mon Oct 2 20:49:18 UTC 2006

daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> I am currently reading the Terms of Service of Myspace. [...]
> Forbidden thing 11 is:
> displaying an advertisement on your profile, or accepting 
> payment or anything of value from a third person in exchange for 
> your performing any commercial activity on or through the 
> MySpace Services on behalf of that person,

The Wikipedia community's background in free software is different 
from this.  The reason why you cannot use your personal Myspace 
account for selling advertising is not that Myspace wants to be 
ad-free, but because Myspace wants to sell that advertising 
themselves.  On the other hand, if some company wants some 
functionality added to Linux or to the Mediawiki software (for 
example, to adopt to the company's file format or hardware), they 
are free to pay somebody to do this, and release the modifications 
under the same GPL license.

If a hotel chain wants to promote tourism in their area, they are 
(and should be) free to pay somebody to write good articles for 
Wikipedia about places, sights and monuments in that area.  Of 
course, the articles must be NPOV and contain verifiable facts, 
describe notable objects, the contents must not violate any 
copyrights and it must be released under the GFDL.  But the 
commercial purpose is not forbidden, and the WMF doesn't need a 
cut from the money that went into the authoring of this contents.

If the hotel chain went and talked to Myspace, I assume that 
Myspace could allow them to set up a non-personal (commercial) 
account for a fee with different terms of service.  I don't use 
Myspace and I don't know if they sell such accounts, but I guess 
it could be a good business to do so.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se