Google has introduced it's Knol. It allows people to write an article about a given subject. This article is per standard licensed under the CC-by license but you can change this to either CC-by-nd or "all rights reserved".
One way of getting information out is by publishing it, and publish it some more. Now, many Wikipedia articles have great content, so why not make all this wisdom of the crowds available on Knol as well ? Well actually you cannot from a legalistic point of view. The GFDL and the CC-by-sa are incompatible with the Knol licenses. So officially you cannot share Wikipedia content in Knol.
Some people created knols using Wikipedia articles. They have been told to desist. They are.. In this whole saga that developed on the Foundation list, there was one quote that caught my attention. "Knowledge should be free, right? This is a fight nobody should win". Meaning that we have to remember what we are about; getting information to people. Now in my opinion, if a knol is licensed as CC-by an uses Wikipedia content, I would not find it a problem. When people make the information LESS free, it would be arguably be a different thing. All the rest is politics.
Thanks,
GerardM
2 comments:
But allowing content to be licensed under CC-BY, that means that you allow people to make it less free. Without the SA bit, it's no longer strong copyleft, people can prevent you from benefit from derivatives. CC-BY is NOT "more free" - it gives more options of use, but it guarantees LESS freedom. This is the good old BSD vs FSF thing, "freedom of the user" vs "freedom of the work".
This is why many Wikipedians are NOT fine with CC-BY licensing. If WP content gets reused under CC-BY-SA, we shouldn't be bitchy about it. But CC-BY is a different matter.
As I said, the rest is politics. There are good arguments to say that the BSD license is more free then the GPL similarly CC-by and GFDL.
Thanks,
GerardM
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