CZ:License Essays/Zach Pruckowski
Originally, I wasn't going to write a license essay, and just offer comments on the ones others had written, but it appears no one has written a pro-GFDL piece, so I'll step in to fill the gap (albeit a day or two late).
License Considerations
By definition, all Citizendium licenses must allow derivative works. Otherwise, we couldn't improve upon the works of others.
There are three decisions to make. They are:
- Share-Alike: Do we want to force re-users to open their improvements for re-integration?
- Commercial Use: Do we want our users to be able to profit from derivatives of CZ's works?
- Wikipedia Compatibility: Wikipedia is at best a starting point for CZ articles, but it opens us up to the works of thousands of authors who write there but not here.
The central premise is that the readers are paramount. Everything we're doing here is not for our personal benefit, but rather for the benefit of the people who will read Citizendium in the future.
Forcing re-users to share their changes with us allows us to make improvements faster - as no one can be "selfish" with their improvements, we gain extra help. This invalidates public domain license options, Berkley/MIT style licenses, or any non-SA Creative Commons license
Commercial Use
I certainly don't want someone else to profit off of my work, and I can imagine that worry is magnified when education is one's profession (like many of our editors). However, commercial use offers some advantage. Since a free copy always be available here at Citizendium, there's little profit to made from unmodified versions of our work. However, if someone can make money off of derivative versions that we can't implement, then all the better. Two ideas come to mind:
- One of the most common requests has been an image licensing program - obtaining rights for "non-free" images. Imagine a for-profit Citizendium-derivative that could at least offer that option (by paying for important images). They'd be crediting us for our work, and also providing an additional service that a non-profit Citizendium couldn't easy provide.
- A bound version of Citizendium would certainly require some form of commercial endeavor, baring a major donation specifically for that purpose.
For our users, this means either more choices, or some limited indirect subsidizing of improvement of our content - both of those are a win for users. Our content can never become "locked behind a gate" in any meaningful way, since we can re-incorporate most content improvements into our free version.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has 2 million articles. If even 1% of those are usable as starting points, then that's still 20,000 articles, which is a lot more than we currently have. Wikipedia currently has 5 million registered users. If 1/10 of 1% of those are intelligent, insightful people, then that's 5,000 people we'd love to have. Allowing the direct import of articles and information from Wikipedia will help us develop faster. That's a crucial consideration, as our usefulness is directly proportional to our article base and our number of approved articles. If we can refine even a few thousand WP articles, that's a crucial consideration. At worse, Wikipedia can re-take part of our content, which exposes our quality content to more readers, and forces them to advertise for us.
In summary, I think that the advantages conferred by Wikipedia accessibilty make the GFDL more useful than the CC-BY-SA license. I also think that Commercial use will benefit our users in the long run. If it's the users that count to us, we should go for the GFDL.