Re: Re: Re: Are images GFDL'd?

Martin,

I suppose we really should go back to basics for this, since it'll help to avoid confusion.

I contribute here for the good of humanity. To make knowledge readily available to all. That's my fundamental purpose.

Similarly, I'm one of the contributors to the SpamPal project for the same reason. The license to the SpamPal program, to which I've contributed, is effectively OpenBSD with one additional restriction: cannot be used in support of spamming.

That's extremely open content. Not quite as open as OpenBSD, but close enough and in keeping with the anti-spam purpose of the project. One company, at least, is developing a commercial derivative and the main SpamPal developer and myself, along with others involved in the project, are happy to assist them in doing so because our objective is stopping spam, not forcing people to make their program public. Doesn't matter to us - if they use what we've developed, they are stopping more spam and the world wins.

For the Wikipedia, the project goal is spread of knowledge. It doesn't matter to me whether it's commercial or non-commercial spread. If a license stops people form incorporating Wikipedia content in a work and spreading more knowledge, the license is getting in the way.

Unfortunately, the Wikipedia is currently locked up, with much of the content tied to the very restrictive and hard to understand GFDL license. I contribute here because it's a successful project. I tolerate the unwelcome and unnecessarily restrictive license because doing so helps the knowledge to spread more than it would if I was contributing to another project. Give me an alternative project with OpenBSD license and comparable body of work and I'd be gone in an instant, because I could benefit humanity more by working on that project instead of this one. The project doesn't exist, so I'm here and the moment I can do it easily, I'll license all my contributions to articles under a dozen other licenses, as many of them as possible less restrictive than any copyleft license.

The reason is simple enough: copyleft makes it hard to reuse the content and I don't want to make it hard. I want to make it easy.

For me, the ideal image is public domain, because it's completely open content. I'm not sure what it would be for you - maybe GFDL. Not sure whether you'd want to replace a public domain image with a GFDL one - depends on how strongly you want to lock things up with GFDL as opposed to spreading them widely.

Unfortunately, there's a problem. You see, a child is not legally readily able to make a contract. That means the child is prohibited from using the GFDL content in a school homework paper because the child can't release their paper under the GFDL without a completely impractical set of steps. If you prefer the GFDL, you're making life hard for children (and schools, for that matter) and that's completely opposed to what I want to be doing. If Texas wants to use a portion of the Wikipedia in textbooks and keep the rest of the book copyrighted so it doesn't have to buy GFDL rather than single use licenses to the rest, that's fine by me. It's contrary to the GFDL, though, so it can't do it. I don't like locking the content up like that.

I'll take commercial reuse to make life easier for everyone else. I want the work shared and reused as widely as possible.

Now, since you're probably fuming at this point, I'll go back a bit in history.:)

There was a time when the GPL and GFDL were necessary. Back in the pre-internet days distribution was really tough. It was reasonable to assume that wicked companies would try to take things and reuse them without credit and may be so much better known than the original source that the evil big company could make lots of money from the content without anyone ever knowing that anyone could use it without paying the nasty license fee.

That's not the world we're in today. Today the Wikipedia is in the top 1,000 sites on the net and rising fast and anyone can search for text in a search engine... and find it in the Wikipedia, because we're not going away any time soon and we're going to be near the top of the search results. The evil company isn't going to get far because people will find us easily instead of paying the outrageous fee. Our name is already out there and recognized. Just like US federal government works, it's known what we are and that knowledge is spreading rapidly. People see Wikipedia, they KNOW that they can use it, or where to find the original, without complicated legal requirements. Except, of course, that we make them use the GFDL, so they do have complicated legal requirements to follow.

Today, we could release under the public domain and it would be in the public domain and available to the public forever. We just don't need copyleft any more. Search engines do the job now.

I don't actually favor public domain release but all we need is something almost as broad which isn't quite public domain. That will spread the knowledge far and wide as everyone who can uses it and everyone learns that we're the source for basic information about everything.

There's really only one term we need to accomplish that and I'm not sure it's necessary. That's a mention that "Some content comes from the Wikipedia (link here)" placed on the copyright information page for a site or other product.

Anything more than that is getting in the way.

Jimmy Wales hasn't yet succeeded... but success is assured at this point, IMO. We are going to be the source and the Wikipedia name is going to be well known and instantly recognized.

What we need to do now is recognize that success and adapt accordingly.

Back to images... I want a rich encyclopedia, so I'll take, today, all the content I can get without copyright infringement. I'll let the future take care of replacing it with less locked up content if that is practical. If I have to expend effort, I'll expend it on letting reusers indicate the license types they want so they can select a subset which meets their requirements. That way we can expand as fast as possible and those who need specific subsets can get them.

Eventually, in my dreams, almost everything here will be in the public domain and completely free to use, forever, by anyone, for any purpose, without them needing to worry about whether they are complying with the GFDL or any other restrictive license.

Of course, conventional commercial licenses are worse than the GFDL. The GFDL IS more open than them. Just not open enough to be really easy for a child or anyone else to reuse.