[WikiEN-l] (no subject)

Fri Dec 16 14:43:48 UTC 2005

Mike Finucane wrote:
> The only objection I have is to allowing others to make profits from my
> work.  That definition of freedom isnt in my dictionary.

Mike, there are probably dimensions to this which you have not considered.

Right now, African schools (for example) suffer under a situation in
which proprietary textbooks generate absurd profits for publishers who
keep prices high.  They therefore cannot afford new up-to-date textbooks
and generally go without or use very old used textbooks.

A non-commercial-only license does not help them nearly as much as a
free license, because a free license makes possible a competitive
marketplace.  Enterpreneurs can find an opportunity in taking your
freely licensed photos and freely licensed
wikipedia/wikibooks/wiktionary/etc. content and building it into
something useful, at a *far lower cost*.

If you think it's dishonorable to make money by providing a useful
service in a non-proprietary way, then of course we'll never agree.

But it sounds to me like what you are opposed to is not *profit* per se,
but *locking things up*.  If you said, "I don't want to contribute my
work to the commons if that means that some company can make a
proprietary version and not give any changes they make back to the
community" then I would agree with you completely: this is why I like
copyleft.

--Jimbo