[Wikipedia-l] [Fwd: Open-Site.org]

Fri Jan 31 15:35:41 UTC 2003

>> Perhaps the most important thing of all would be license
compatibility.  They say that they will have a "free license" -- it it
is GNU FDL, that's great.  If it's something else, well, things can
get very complicated as far as reuse goes. <<

In the month of February we will finalize the license issues, probably GNU FDL 
will be chosed.

>> When it comes to copyright, the real problem is not going to be with 
people who put copyrighted material into an on-line encyclopedia. 
 That's easily removed as soon as it's recognized.  It's going to be 
with people who try to claim personal copyrights on openly licensed or 
even public domain material.  <<

Public domain material is by definition uncopyrighted. People can not, by 
definition, claim personal copyrights on public domain materials. At best, 
they can argue whether a certain material is in public domain or not.

Personal copyrights on openly licensed material is not something new. If I 
create a material and publish it under the GNU FDL license, I still have 
copyright on it and I'm free to distribute it under any other license that I 
choose to. People will be able to use my material according to the GNU FDL, 
or select the alternative licenses that I offer to them.

This is the way the Mozilla project ( http://mozilla.org ) works, by allowing 
their code to be distributed both under GPL and MPL licenses.

>> There is a copyright notice on the bottom of each page. <<

That will be debated in the month of February, like specified above. Right 
now, it means that anybody contributing to the Open-site project agrees to 
its distribution license, while still retaining the copyright of their 
submissions. The words "Open-site" refer in that particular instance to the 
Open-site contributors.

The Internet community can use content in the Open-site project according to 
its license (probably GNU GPL), but authors of the original content can still 
use the material at their discretion.

>> They are younger project, and I see nothing in there about how they 
would handle such issues as NPOV and vandalism. <<

Senior editors at the project have discretion regarding editorial account 
removal.

Thanks,
Vlad.