CZ:License Essays/Joe Quick

- By Joe Quick

GFDL: Just say no.

We all know that the GFDL is not designed for wikis and is incomprehensible to many of the people who would like to make use of wiki content that is licensed as GFDL, but there is a further reason to avoid it: Jimmmy Wales wants to copy anything of value that we are able to produce. He said so himself. For our own short term survival, as we continue to build up our reputation in the community at large, we need to be able to show that we can offer something that Wikipedia does not have. If Wikipedia copies our content, then we have nothing to show, so the GFDL is a particularly bad move.

On commercial reuse

I was originally very much opposed to the idea that someone could swoop in and grab all of my contributions to Citizendium in order to line their own pockets and leave me out in the cold. Such sentiments are likely to be common following on the heals of controversies such as the current lawsuit against Virgin Mobile.

There's another factor to consider, however, one that has come up on the Citizendium forums but not been given much attention: if we go with a Creative Commons license, commercial reusers are required to release their products under the same license as the original content (or a compatible one - there are none yet). That's what "share alike" means. So if a company pours fifty thousand dollars into a project to develop our cc-by-sa material into a new product, they are required to release the new product under a cc-by-sa. We benefit from that commercial endeavor in the same way that Jimbo Wales wants to benefit from our work: we can simply copy it back and give attribution.

My recommedation

CC-BY-SA

I think we should choose Creative Commons-attribution-share alike.

• It protects us from situations like that of the plaintiffs in the Virgin Mobile case because re-users must share alike (they all used CC-BY).
• It protects us from predatory Wikipedia editors (who are free to link to us but not to copy our content wholesale).
• It allows us to benefit from others' commercial enterprises.