A fascinating license question

[Larry Sanger]

Please remember that indecision is still a decision. Your reluctance to choose a licence means you have not licensed the material. While we debate how wide the door should be opened, someone has sneaked in, closed the door, locked bolted and bricked up the entrance. There is nobody arguing that the content should be completely closed to any other distribution. So open the door a little bit. We can always reword the licence later to make it more open but the current status of a closed content must be changed.

Derek, with all due respect, I think it would be the height of foolishness for me to declare a decision without having thought it out completely.  Please be patient.  A decision will be announced Monday.

[Warren Schudy]

You seem to be of the opinion that CZ owns the content on CZ. It is a good thing for this to be legally true so we can switch open-source licenses, but morally, many of us believe that the authors are the owners of our work, and we are licensing our work to the CZ under an open-source license of CZ's choice. Therefore, CZ is authorized to switch open-source licenses, but cannot relicense our work under a non-open license as you're proposing.

The reason we object to CZ making money in this way is it would be violating the license by which it receives content from the authors. We are fine with either media corporations or CZ making money as long as they respect the nebulous open source license that we authors have contributed our work under.

The license issue should have been resolved a long time ago, but the fact that it was not must not prevent us from choosing the appropriate strategy to make CZ work in a sustainable way. Part of the philosophy we have been trying to create on CZ is that of a community, which is owned and administered by its residents. Individualist libertarian arguments (such as the above) are not conducive to building a community; this is not to say that members of a community should not have individual rights, but that those rights have to be consistent with (and frequently inferior to) the rights of the shared community. If people do not accept the underlying philosophy of the CZ community, then they should not join as citizens [i.e. editors, authors] but are welcome as users of the Citizendium.

Adopting cc-nc-sa would make CZ freely available but not open source (by OSI's popular definition). This is certainly a legitimate way to run an encyclopedia, but I believe it's a bad idea. As noted in this thread, several citizens feel uncomfortable participating in such a project. If CZ adopted this model, I would probably switch my efforts to getting an approval process at Wikipedia rather than contributing to CZ. I expect many in the open source community would also be uncomfortable with this model. For example, if we somehow needed SF's services, we would not be able to use them if we had a cc-nc-sa license (they link to OSI and therefore presumably use their definition).

I believe unobtrusive (e.g. google) ads would do far less damage to the project than not being open source would.

I think a good analogy can be made with digital rights management for music. DRM sounds like a good idea (who wants their stuff stolen), but it pisses too many people off to be worthwhile.

[Aleta Curry]

Warren, too many acronyms/abbreviations/initialisms in your posts.

Have pity on the rest of us, okay?

[a.a.s.]

A general remark. Programs and more "human" knowledge/content are two different animals.
For many programs a non-commercial license would make them just pointless (e.g. operating systems).
For educational open (freely-accessible) content a non-commercial choice is quite natural thing and it doesn't seem to make it "less free".

BTW, when it comes to on-line publishing the president of OSI prefers to use general copyright + internal (pretty open) policies to ensure high quality of re-publications, cf. full details here. And while e.g.  "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is "free" on-line (open publication license), the author sold O'Reilly the exclusive commercial printing rights (see here).

Just a thought.

[update/PS. Right, I should explain, i use OSI for  Open Source Initiative.]

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

It is against the policy of Citizendium to use unnecessary acronyms and abbreviations, because it excludes a lot of people from discussion -- in other words, it is an in-group device. There are some acronyms which cannot be avoided, as noted by Per Lind above, because those are the wretched titles of the licensing arrangements. [It is not our fault, Per !]

I, for one, have no idea what SF or OSI is, so your comments are incomprehensible to me, Warren. Furthermore, I cannot be bothered to find out, so perhpas you could repost in English?

[RJensen]

What's missing from the discussion is CZ's "business plan." It's clear how we will get say 100,000 articles. It is a mystery to me how they will be distributed to the public. What sort of servers and how much tech support will CZ have to provide to handle 10,000 hits a day? 1 million a day? 100 million a day? More to the point, how much $ will each cost CZ and where will the cash come from?

[Stephen Ewen]

OSI
SF
DRM

OSI - Open Source Initiative, like Alek's post says

SF - Free Software Foundation? - this is the parent organization of the GFDL

DRM - Digital Rights Management - an example is the encryption of a DVD

[Geoffrey Plourde]

A general remark. Programs and more "human" knowledge/content are two different animals.
For many programs a non-commercial license would make them just pointless (e.g. operating systems).
For educational open (freely-accessible) content a non-commercial choice is quite natural thing and it doesn't seem to make it "less free".

BTW, when it comes to on-line publishing the president of OSI prefers to use general copyright + internal (pretty open) policies to ensure high quality of re-publications, cf. full details here. And while e.g.  "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is "free" on-line (open publication license), the author sold O'Reilly the exclusive commercial printing rights (see here).

Just a thought.

[update/PS. Right, I should explain, i use OSI for  Open Source Initiative.]

This is true in a perfect world. However you aren't taking into account that everything in our less than perfect world costs money. The hosts don't pay themselves, nor do the qualified techs necessary to maintain servers. Citizendium wouldn't profit, because that would be illegal under Internal Revenue Code 501(c)3 and the IRS is particularly nasty about those kinds of things. Would mandatory auditing ease your fears?   

Open Source won't pay the bills, which keeps the doors open. By utilizing a hybrid license, we would be making the content more free to individual users. The thing about "open source" licensing is it locks up the licensed material just as well as a copyright license. This proposal opens up a new arena and is sustainable. We are not Wikipedia! In any way shape or form!

[tkjazzer]

there are so many wikipedia haters in the CZ elite that making a license decision seems... well... tainted?

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

there are so many wikipedia haters in the CZ elite that making a license decision seems... well... tainted?

That is simply a very inaccurate statement. Most CZ people have had bad experiences on WP, which is why CZ tries to deal with the wiki type problems that exist. I have always argued that we shouild confine any criticism of WP to substantive matters, and avoid direct conflict because it is not helpful or necessary: WP and CZ can coexist quite peacefully. However, self-definition of a community is always accompanied by contrast with "others" and it is perhaps in this sense that you think you can see "wikipedia haters".

[Anthony_DiPierro]

we "give back" information free to individuals, not corps.

None of the licenses I've ever seen make a distinction between individuals and corporations.  What license are you thinking of that does this?

CC-BY-NC forbids copying and distribution for "commercial advantage or private monetary compensation".  It doesn't just affect corporations, it affects everyone.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

I suppose that Aleta means that individuals on CZ are presumed to be members of CZ as individuals who are not participating for economic gain, and therefore would not wish to copy or distribute the content for commercial advantage. Indeed, that is my assumption too, and I am not sure that I want anyone to be able to make money from CZ without everyone's explicit agreement.

There are some unstated assumptions in this discussion which are a little worrying...

[Stephen Ewen]

Free content but more importantly, freely distributed content, ensures that the knowledge gets to those who need it most and have least.

I think it is this dogma of the free content movement that most pains me.  Having been recipient of a solid basic free education in the developed world, those with this idea of "free" now venture from their armchairs that it is a virtue for education to be distributed at a cost, and that it is a virtue for societies to be stratified because of this rather than undergo leveling because of free education.  For those who say they are committed to egalitarianism - oh, the irony.

[Aleta Curry]

I suppose that Aleta means that individuals on CZ are presumed to be members of CZ as individuals who are not participating for economic gain, and therefore would not wish to copy or distribute the content for commercial advantage. Indeed, that is my assumption too, and I am not sure that I want anyone to be able to make money from CZ without everyone's explicit agreement.

There are some unstated assumptions in this discussion which are a little worrying...

That's it in a nutshell.

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

R u callin' me a NUTTA?