GFDL?

[geni]

If CZ will have experts, it does not need a clever guy to improve the material.

How many typesetters?

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

I read all your arguments, have heard them hundreds of times, and understand them.  That is not the issue.  It is that I reject them for reasons I stated (and ones I have not). Free (as in this will never and can never cost anyone money) is much more important than "free" (as in you can charge money for this).

Sorry if you thought I was referring to you with my comment about understanding---it was directed at Versuri.  I had no sense that you misunderstood, though obviously we strongly disagree on certain issues.

I appreciate your desire for free as in beer and agree it's an important goal.  What I don't understand is why you think that a non-commercial-only restriction is necessary to ensure this.  After all, if someone did release a commercially-sold book based on Citizendium material, the GFDL means that I could stick it under the photocopier and take as much as I desire without paying the publisher a penny.

Conversely, where you do see publishers selling GFDL'd books for profit, the reason they make money is not because of the content---that is usually available for free online.   The reason they can make a business is because people want that content in book form, and are willing to pay for the cost of making the book.  I think that's a legitimate demand on the part of users and we should support that possibility.

As one who has devoted much of his life to working in development in poor countries, this is my favorite argument to pick apart. Let's cut to the chase. For every scenario you can paint me that would bring hardcopies of an encyclopedia to the poor for a fee, I can paint a scenario for that same context that utilizes grant-funding to bring it more successfully at no cost to the end-user. Plus I'll donate my time as a grant writer. 

... and indeed my comment acknowledged that this would be a possibility, and a good one.  I would be very happy if you achieved such an aim.

It shouldn't be the only possibility, though, because it relies on someone actually donating money somewhere along the way.  Potential users should not have to rely on generosity: the choice of whether paying a fee for access is acceptable or not should be up to them, not to us.

In the big picture, any redistribution is a win.  If an enterprise can spread Citizendium's material by selling it, great.  It's easy to say, "Oh, they're making profits off it and we could do it cheaper with a grant without charging people a penny," but if the business is getting it there now and the grant or other free-as-in-beer access isn't there now, then the business is providing a valuable service and should not be disallowed.  After all, once the material is there in people's hands, the free-as-in-freedom license immediately hands to them the possibility of developing their own methods of copying, modifying and redistributing it that may be far better suited to their purposes and needs than anything we can impose.

[Larry Sanger]

Many discussions and arguments on this forum are devoted to the alternative CC-by-SA or CC-by-NC-SA. In spite of this, are we leaning to GFDL? I mean the article "How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles" that basicaly encourages importing from WP. And, as far as I can understand certain discussions, this implies global GFDL (at the beginning for a set of articles, then for many, then for all, as we do not like different licences for different sets of articles).

We will definitely be deciding licensing issues soon--we must.

I am not at all persuaded that we need to use one license for all CZ articles, simply because we must use GFDL for those articles sourced from Wikipedia.  I'll be reading the various conversations that have taken place so far, but I have no idea what the argument could be that would force us into licensing all of our articles GFDL.  Some of course might say that having one license would be convenient, and therefore we should use the GFDL, and that's a strong argument, but it isn't a show-stopping, legal argument.

I'm not sure why we don't like difference licenses for different sets of articles.  Wikipedia will have to decide whether it wants to dual license content CC-by-whatever and GFDL if it wants to use content from us.  Even better, maybe Wikipedia will recognize that it doesn't friggin matter what the license is (as I am about to explain).

Frankly, I find this whole morass of issues to be ridiculous, as I have since 2000 when I first started thinking about it.  It's too often a silly game played by lawyer wannabes, with no solid grounding in legal realities nor even any conceptual clarity.  The very first questions I think about are questions that are rarely considered, or shrugged at, by different advocates who assume there's no problem.  Well, folks, it doesn't make sense to me to be an advocate for anything if you haven't thought through certain basic philosophical questions about all this mess.

For example--this is just one example--there's the attribution requirement.  At the simplest level, as with unchanged images, this is easy to understand and implement.  Joe Blow took the picture and posted it under a certain license; therefore, if you give Joe Blow credit, you can use it too.  Fine.  But what if we're dealing with text, and X started an encyclopedia article with a paragraph, and Y added another, and Z another, and so forth?  Are we supposed to credit every single person in order to satisfy the attribution requirement?  What if, as on Wikipedia, there are people who insist on anonymity?  What if it turns out that many people were using pseudonyms?  Are we obligated to discover their identities in order to give them credit?  (Why not?  Isn't that what the license requires?)  And maybe it's only X, the first contributor, who deserves credit.  After all, it was he who created the work in the first place.  If the Y "relicenses" X's work, with changes, then mustn't Y (that person) give X credit?  And isn't it Y (that person) who should (in the case of the GFDL) include a copy of the license on the changes?  Does it matter or change the situation if X, Y, and Z are working as part of a community?  Surely it must, or you all wouldn't be earnestly debating what license "we" should use.  If "we" commit to using a license as part of a community project, then isn't it the community project that deserves the attribution credit?  If you think so, why does the community project get credit when the community members don't--just because it's unworkable to give credit to everyone?

These are all, to me, completely obvious questions, and there are dozens (or hundreds) more where they came from.

And, as I've said, attempting to answer most of these questions is totally silly.  It's just intellectual window-dressing, rationalization for a behavior that we want to engage in.  We want to:

• contribute our work to a community-managed pool of content, developed by strong collaboration.
• ensure that this pool of content always remains free for use and reuse, except maybe for profitable uses.
• allow other entities (individuals and organizations) to use and further develop what we produce.
• remain free to take the stuff that we personally contributed and use it however we personally please.
• (some people also add) disallow for-profit enterprises from profiting from the content.

The idea, then, is that we try to implement this entire legal situation using a combination of licenses and current legal practices.  There is no agreed-upon way to do that.  For instance, the GFDL has been absurdly pressed into service for purposes and practices (such as radical collaboration) it wasn't designed to satisfy.  Ultimately the problem is that we are attempting to work within a legal framework in which self-contained items created by definite, named, real-world contributors are licensed to definite other people for reuse.  It should be obvious (or, at least it's obvious to me) that the whole practice of strong collaboration and free reuse, which works like public domain but which somehow forbids certain activities such as restrictive copyrighting of new versions, cannot be modeled within that old framework--not with any coherence.

A good first start at a solution would be to for the world, beginning with us, to recognize that the things that are "licensed" are whole bodies of contents--tarballs--not absurd "documents" that consist of a few edits--and that the entity that is doing the "licensing" is the entity responsible for the contents, i.e., the Citizendium community or perhaps the Citizendium Foundation.  Then we can begin to speak with more coherence about such questions as to whether we will have a noncommercial license, and what our obligations are generally.

The next important issue is to establish a body of legal doctrine, independent of particular licenses, about the rights of the various entities that manage bodies of content.  There needs to be a legal basis for interoperability of open content licenses; currently, there isn't any such.  I'm sure this will raise howls of protest, but it seems pretty obvious to me that only the law can ultimately recognize interoperability, and it can do that only by ignoring or interpreting certain clauses in actual licenses.  Ultimately what there needs to be is legal conventions, encoded not necessarily in the details of idiosyncratic licenses but in particular rights and obligations that are recognized by the law, constituted by declarations made by, e.g., the CZ community.

Perhaps this is what Lessig had in mind with his generic Creative Commons licenses, but ultimately, he sidestepped the problem by advocating for yet another set of licenses, instead of for a legal-conceptual framework that makes specific licenses irrelevant.  In other words, instead of saying, "Here's the license for you to use if you want 'by-sa' rights," he could have said, "Any of the following licenses offer 'by-sa' rights.  We at the Creative Commons Foundation believe [and here's our philosophical and legal reasoning...] that anyone can reuse the content offered under these licenses so long as they... [list of restrictions]."  In short, CC gets into the business of articulating the philosophical/legal framework for interoperability, and actually plays legal sorter/matchmaker of licenses.

They'd probably eventually get sued for doing this, probably by the FSF, once someone took CC's advice and started using some content created under the GFDL without actually slapping the GFDL on the content.  Then the courts and/or the legislature would have to clarify what legal framework we're actually working under.  And then CC could quite plausibly argue as I have hinted above that society greatly benefits by the law's recognizing legal interoperability, and thus (this follows deductively from the very notion of interoperability, you might notice) that certain details of certain licenses have no effect.

Indeed, I suspect that, philosophically, there are no grounds whatsoever to justify opposition to interoperability--assuming that the government will establish a sensible legal framework for interoperability.  After all, the very point of having an open content license is to allow the content to propagate, so long as certain things (such as restrictive copyrighting) are disallowed from happening; it makes up no part of the justification for having an open content license that the particular license be propagated as well.  In other words, our main interest is in declaring certain rights; if this doesn't require that we use a license, and if using a license is actually contrary to the purposes we had in declaring those rights in the first place, then perhaps we should find a different legal scheme to rely upon to secure our rights than old-fashioned licensing.

In the meantime, I think we'll probably just dual-license our articles.  [/list]

[MikeJohnson]

Makes sense to me, Larry. Strictly speaking, there appear to be legal issues in dual-licensing content (i.e. the FDL and CC-sa licenses require derivative works to be under *precisely* the FDL and CC-sa, respectively). A discussion of this: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2005-May/002265.html

But if we choose to dual-license our content under the FDL and CC-by-sa I'm of the opinion we could just assert our content is dual-licensed and trust that either 1. things will work out if put to a formal test, or 2. creative commons will figure out compatibility between these two licenses before it becomes an issue.