On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 12:55 PM, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com <jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com> wrote: >> I would like a professional opinion on the question : > Better stated, I would like your opinion on this, if it is not off topic. >> Is wikipedia non commercial or commercial non profit? > Is working on the wikipedia more like a commercial non profit work and > not really non commecial in terms of the microsoft licenses quoted.
Thank you for revising your question. (1) As with many things: The question with the greatest impact is: Does anyone care? There are a lot of questions which are very hard to clearly answer but which do not create problems simply because no one cares. I've never heard of a major software company hauling someone to court over a non-commercial/educational use license, and while it's probably happened I doubt it's a frequent occurrence. (2) The actual answer to your question depends on the definition of "non-commercial" in the particular license. If non-commercial isn't clearly defined for the purpose of the license then the question is unanswerable, and the user is at their own risk. I'm doubtful that any two commercial software vendors achieves a "non-comercial use only" restriction in the same way. (3) Another way of looking at this is this— By our own rules, materials submitted to Wikipedia must be freely licensed for all kinds of use, including clearly commercial ones. If a "non-commercial use only" software license permitted use for Wikipedia then it would be possible to launder works through Wikipedia in order to make them available for commercial use. This would probably not be a desired effect, but it may be the common reality; see (1). (4) If some of our own users are violating their licenses while contributing, thats unfortunate but it's a risk that they've personally chosen to take which we can't control. From this perspective the non-commercial issue is, at worse, little different from using completely unlicensed software... also something we can't control. (5) Of course, many people in the Wikipedia communities recommend users use Free Software and our project pages reflect these recommendations. Free Software enables the collaboration and cooperation which are essential to the Wikimedia projects, avoids complicated software license permission concerns, and supports the openness and transparency which should be common to good scholarship. Considering (4) and (5), this is basically off-topic... To the (almost non-existent) extent that we have any effective policy at all on software that our users use it is to recommend that they use Free Software; we can't know how users software is licensed; any license violation by a user that did exist would be their issue rather than ours. Cheers, _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
