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TheSync writes: The Syrian open source developer, blogger, entrepreneur, hackerspace founder, and free culture advocate Bassell Khartabil was swept up in a wave of military arrests in March 2012. A CBC report states that his wife wrote on Facebook late Tuesday that she has received confirmation that security services executed Khartabil in October 2015 after torturing him in prison. Before his arrest, his most recent work included a 3D virtual reconstruction of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria.
At the time of his arrest, Khartabi was 30 years old -- after which he started a blog called "MeInSyrianJail" and a Twitter account called "Live from my cell." Though he spent the last three and half years of his life in prison, he once tweeted that "Jail is not walls, not the executioner and guards. It is the hidden fear in our hearts that makes us prisoners." The latest tweet on his feed says "Rest in power our friend."

Thursday the Creative Commons nonprofit described the developer as "our friend and colleague," and announced the Bassel Khartabil Memorial Fund, "which will support projects in the spirit of Bassel's work."

ChristianVillum writes: Creative Commons staff-members Sarah Hinchliff Pearson and Paul Stacey have now published Made With Creative Commons, the awaited book they successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2015. "Made With Creative Commons is a book about sharing," explains the book's description. "It is about sharing textbooks, music, data, art, and more. People, organizations, and businesses all over the world are sharing their work using Creative Commons licenses because they want to encourage the public to reuse their works, to copy them, to modify them... But if they are giving their work away to the public for free, how do they make money?

"This is the question this book sets out to answer. There are 24 in-depth examples of different ways to sustain what you do when you share your work. And there are lessons, about how to make money but also about what sharing really looks like -- why we do it and what it can bring to the economy and the world. Full of practical advice and inspiring stories, Made with Creative Commons is a book that will show you what it really means to share."
There's free versions in PDF, ePub, and MOBI formats for downloading from the Creative Commons site, and there's also an edit-able version on Google Docs. A small Danish non-profit publisher named Ctrl+Alt+Delete Books is also publishing print copies of the book under a Creative Commons license "to ensure easy sharing," and is making the book available on Amazon or through the publisher's own web site.

ChristianVillum writes: Creative Commons staff-members Sarah Hinchliff Pearson and Paul Stacey have now published Made With Creative Commons, the awaited book they successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2015. "Made With Creative Commons is a book about sharing," explains the book's description. "It is about sharing textbooks, music, data, art, and more. People, organizations, and businesses all over the world are sharing their work using Creative Commons licenses because they want to encourage the public to reuse their works, to copy them, to modify them... But if they are giving their work away to the public for free, how do they make money?

"This is the question this book sets out to answer. There are 24 in-depth examples of different ways to sustain what you do when you share your work. And there are lessons, about how to make money but also about what sharing really looks like -- why we do it and what it can bring to the economy and the world. Full of practical advice and inspiring stories, Made with Creative Commons is a book that will show you what it really means to share."
There's free versions in PDF, ePub, and MOBI formats for downloading from the Creative Commons site, and there's also an edit-able version on Google Docs. A small Danish non-profit publisher named Ctrl+Alt+Delete Books is also publishing print copies of the book under a Creative Commons license "to ensure easy sharing," and is making the book available on Amazon or through the publisher's own web site.

Last month DESIGN Shift successfully crowdfunded their physically-secure (and open source) ORWL computer. But this week long-time Slashdot reader Dr. Crash raised concerns that "releasing only the equivalent of 'assembly code' (PDFs of the schematic, Gerber files) and requiring an NDA for the BIOS and mechanical security just doesn't cut it... " Slashdot contacted the company, which two hours ago posted a response: After feedback from some of you and more internal discussion, we've decided to open the schematics source files under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0... Our reasoning is that the benefit of being able to much more easily inspect the inner workings of ORWL far outweighs the minimal risk of infringement by a third party. Even if a third party does decide to copy ORWL for profit, they would quickly discover the real work is in the layout, not the schematic, as is the case in most hardware...

[T]he firmware will be licensed under GPL 3 rather than CC-BY-SA 4.0. This change is in line with the Creative Commons's own recommendations regarding software licensing. We also realized that some of our firmware uses libraries provided under NDA. We will clearly identify which components are protected under NDA and how to go about securing such an NDA.
They've already released a .zip file of their schematics, and in addition announced that "we're committing to opening the PCB layout sources once we've sold a total of 3,000 ORWL unit." Their announcement includes a link for feedback from the community.

Last month DESIGN Shift successfully crowdfunded their physically-secure (and open source) ORWL computer. But this week long-time Slashdot reader Dr. Crash raised concerns that "releasing only the equivalent of 'assembly code' (PDFs of the schematic, Gerber files) and requiring an NDA for the BIOS and mechanical security just doesn't cut it... " Slashdot contacted the company, which two hours ago posted a response: After feedback from some of you and more internal discussion, we've decided to open the schematics source files under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0... Our reasoning is that the benefit of being able to much more easily inspect the inner workings of ORWL far outweighs the minimal risk of infringement by a third party. Even if a third party does decide to copy ORWL for profit, they would quickly discover the real work is in the layout, not the schematic, as is the case in most hardware...

[T]he firmware will be licensed under GPL 3 rather than CC-BY-SA 4.0. This change is in line with the Creative Commons's own recommendations regarding software licensing. We also realized that some of our firmware uses libraries provided under NDA. We will clearly identify which components are protected under NDA and how to go about securing such an NDA.
They've already released a .zip file of their schematics, and in addition announced that "we're committing to opening the PCB layout sources once we've sold a total of 3,000 ORWL unit." Their announcement includes a link for feedback from the community.

Last month DESIGN Shift successfully crowdfunded their physically-secure (and open source) ORWL computer. But this week long-time Slashdot reader Dr. Crash raised concerns that "releasing only the equivalent of 'assembly code' (PDFs of the schematic, Gerber files) and requiring an NDA for the BIOS and mechanical security just doesn't cut it... " Slashdot contacted the company, which two hours ago posted a response: After feedback from some of you and more internal discussion, we've decided to open the schematics source files under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0... Our reasoning is that the benefit of being able to much more easily inspect the inner workings of ORWL far outweighs the minimal risk of infringement by a third party. Even if a third party does decide to copy ORWL for profit, they would quickly discover the real work is in the layout, not the schematic, as is the case in most hardware...

[T]he firmware will be licensed under GPL 3 rather than CC-BY-SA 4.0. This change is in line with the Creative Commons's own recommendations regarding software licensing. We also realized that some of our firmware uses libraries provided under NDA. We will clearly identify which components are protected under NDA and how to go about securing such an NDA.
They've already released a .zip file of their schematics, and in addition announced that "we're committing to opening the PCB layout sources once we've sold a total of 3,000 ORWL unit." Their announcement includes a link for feedback from the community.

Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "Finally, you don't have to raise your voice over a group of whisperers in the New York Public Library to get a better view of its map collection. Actually, you don't even need to visit the place at all. Over 20,000 maps and cartographic works from the NYPL's Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division have been uploaded and made downloadable for the public.

'We believe these maps have no known U.S. copyright restrictions,' explains a blog post announcing the wholesale release of the library's map collection. 'It means you can have the maps, all of them if you want, for free, in high resolution. We've scanned them to enable their use in the broadest possible ways by the largest number of people.' The NYPL is distributing the maps under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, which means you can do whatever you want with the maps."

revealingheart writes "Creative Commons has launched new versions of their flexible copyright licenses, after two years of input. Changes include waiving database and moral rights where possible, and adjustments to attribution requirements. Licenses are now designed to work internationally by default."

gnujoshua writes "In a new article, GNU Project founder Richard M. Stallman speaks out against the proposal to include hooks for DRM in HTML5. While others have been making similar arguments, RMS strikes home the point that while companies can still push Web DRM themselves, the stance taken by the W3C is still — both practically and politically — vitally important: '[...] the W3C cannot prevent companies from grafting DRM onto HTML. They do this through nonfree plug-ins such as Flash, and with nonfree Javascript code, thus showing that we need control over the Javascript code we run and over the C code we run. However, where the W3C stands is tremendously important for the battle to eliminate DRM. On a practical level, standardizing DRM would make it more convenient, in a very shallow sense. This could influence people who think only of short-term convenience to think of DRM as acceptable, which could in turn encourage more sites to use DRM. On the political level, making room for DRM in the specifications of the World Wide Web would constitute an endorsement in principle of DRM by the W3C. Standardization by the W3C could facilitate DRM that is harder for users to break than DRM implemented in Javascript code. If the DRM is implemented in the operating system, this could result in distribution of works that can't be played at all on a free operating system such as GNU/Linux.'"

Cynic writes "Inspired by an earlier Slashdot story about Finnish teachers and students writing a math textbook, I pitched the idea of writing our own much cheaper/free C++ textbook to my programming students. They were incredibly positive, so I decided to move forward and started a Kickstarter project. We hope to release the textbook we produce under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and sell cheap hard copies to sustain the hosting and other production costs."

Zocalo writes "The BBC has a fascinating look into the music download habits of the UK population based on stats compiled by Musicmetric. The stats, gathered through the monitoring of BitTorrent swarms and geo-locating the IPs, shows the hotspots for music copyright infringement across the UK and regional preferences for certain types of music. Some of the outliers are somewhat unusual though, suggesting some problems with the methodology or sample size, unless people on the Isle of Wight really do prefer trumpet-playing crooner Louis Armstrong to the likes of Rihanna and Ed Sheeran who top the lists nationwide. Not in the UK? There are some global stats on the ' Most pirated near you? tab' of the story. Better yet, if you want to crunch the numbers for yourself all of the data has been made available at the Musicmatch website under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike license and a RESTful API to access the data (free for non-commercial use, but requiring an API token) is also available."

TheSilentNumber writes "A member of Students for Free Culture has just published a thorough and detailed post calling for the retirement of the non-free clauses, NoDerivatives (ND) and NonCommercial (NC). They state, 'The NC and ND clauses not only depend on, but also feed misguided notions about their purpose and function.' and that 'Instead of wasting effort maintaining and explaining a wider set of conflicting licenses, Creative Commons as an organization should focus on providing better and more consistent support for the licenses that really make sense.'" Note that the opinions expressed are of the author alone and not necessarily the entire organization. More info on the process of revising the CC licenses.

Lendrick writes "OpenGameArt.org, the Free Software Foundation, and the Creative Commons are teaming up to bring the Liberated Pixel Cup, a free-as-in-freedom game making contest starting on June 1st and going through July 31st. The contest will be divided into two phases: the first phase will be about adding on to a consistent set of art commissioned specially for the contest, and the second phase, starting on July 1st, will be about building games using the provided art."

Brad Lucier writes "The Saylor Foundation has a vision: Free and open materials for a complete undergraduate university education. To that end, they've announced the first winners in their Open Textbook Challenge: Four textbooks were relicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) Unported license, the most open of the CC licenses, and in return the authors were awarded a prize of $20,000 for each book. See the blog entries and the accompanying press releases for details. The second wave of submissions will be accepted until May 31, 2012."

ktetch-pirate writes "If the SOPA/PIPA blackouts were a wakeup call to many people, then the U.S. Pirate Party has released a book that might help explain some of the issues. The book covers issues such as Corporate Personhood, the 4th Amendment, the history of copyright, and how DRM laws are made. There are even cartoons from Nina Paley throughout to add a bit of humor. DRM-free eBook versions are available to download from the book's site, or you can buy a paperback edition from Amazon for ten bucks." The book is under the CC BY-NC-SA, and features essays from the likes of Lawrence Lessig and Rick Falkvinge.

TheSilentNumber writes "I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the editors of Libre Graphics, a magazine made entirely using free software (even using version control so you can see every change ever made) after they gave a talk at this year's Libre Graphics Meeting. This project is living proof of the printing abilities of Free Software, 'That really is a constant refrain even within our own community. People always still talk about the printing problem. So what printing problem?' Libre Graphics Magazine is doing a truly outstanding job showcasing free works made with free tools, creating a publication of record, and reaching out to designers with this project."

kale77in writes "I was going to direct this question to the Australian Arts Law Centre, and probably still will, but I'm sure they're very busy and I'm sure that someone here must have bumped up against this issue already. I have not found it addressed in the CC FAQ. I have a website which is oriented around the study of Ancient Greek. Much material relevant to this study (texts, lexica, etc) was published in the 1800s; it is now out of copyright and readily available from archive.org and similar sources; but much of this material could use an upgrade and users will have up-to-date contributions of their own to make. I'm writing a system that allows user entry, correcting, searching, commentary, tagging, redistribution and so on, of such material." Read on for the questions this raises about licensing, attribution, and copyright. Kale77in continues: "Here's my issue: I would like everything to be under Creative Commons BY-SA — I can say 'same as Wikipedia' and this will encourage participation and confidence. The question is who should own the copyright of user-created data. I'd like the copyright to be held by the submitter. But I've no interest in enforcing anything more than pseudonymity for the users. Now I understand that copyrights can be held pseudonymously; but how does this allow attribution as required by CC-BY-SA? Is it enough for an author of a derivative work to reference the page on my site where the pseudonymous copyright holder grants the license? Does the end user need to be able to contact the copyright holder for additional rights? Is this a road through a minefield, so that I should just bite the bullet and, like Wikipedia, make a foundation to hold and license the copyright for collaborative works? But that costs money to administer; for a small non-profit venture is it best to just chill and take resort in persuading the users to make everything public domain? Or does a special User Agreement allow some way to gain the benefits of CC licensing (= endless reuse, and no hassle) without losing pseudonymity? But then, won't a complex upfront agreement hinder participation?"

geegel writes "YouTube has announced that it will introduce a Creative Commons license option and also provide remixing capabilities in its video editor. 'You can now access an ever-expanding library of Creative Commons videos to edit and incorporate into your own projects. ... You’ll also be able to mark any or all of your videos with the Creative Commons CC-BY license that lets others share and remix your work, so long as they give you credit.'"

An anonymous reader writes 'I'm a college professor who is putting together an open-source textbook. I'm trying to decide between using the GNU Free Documentation License or the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. I don't really understand the difference between these, though it seems with the Free Documentation License I need to include a copy of the license in my text. Which do you advise using?'

mcpublic writes "When a small team of reverse engineers receives the blessing of a big corporate legal department, it is cause for celebration. For the 38th anniversary of Intel's groundbreaking 4004 microprocessor, the company is allowing us to release new details of their historic MCS-4 chip family announced on November 15, 1971. For the first time, the complete set of schematics and artwork for the 4001 ROM, 4002 RAM, 4003 I/O Expander, and 4004 Microprocessor is available to teachers, students, historians, and other non-commercial users. To their credit, the Intel Corporate Archives gave us access to the original 4004 schematics, along with the 4002, 4003, and 4004 mask proofs, but the rest of the schematics and the elusive 4001 masks were lost until just weeks ago when Lajos Kintli finished reverse-engineering the 4001 ROM from photomicrographs and improving the circuit-extraction software that helped him draw and verify the missing schematics. His interactive software can simulate an ensemble of 400x chips, and even lets you trace a wire or click on a transistor in the chip artwork window and see exactly where it is on the circuit diagram (and vice-versa)."

An anonymous reader writes "Print-on-demand publisher Lulu recently announced that they're offering 'eBooks.' Since they've always offered downloadable books as PDFs, that takes some decoding to figure out what part is new: it turns out that it means now they're handling more formats, they've significantly increased the share they take out of the purchase price ... and for an additional fee, they now offer DRM. I have a few items published through Lulu myself; nothing forces me to buy the DRM, but I'm considering taking my business elsewhere on principle. This isn't what I expected from the people who, when I first signed up with them, were solidly endorsing Creative Commons."

DoubleRing writes "Wildfire Games has announced that it will be moving its previously closed development process for 0 A.D. to open source. All code will be released under the GPL and all art under CC-BY-SA. 0 A.D. is a historically-based RTS, and while it's not yet complete, this trailer is purportedly actual gameplay footage. With a codebase of over 150k lines of C++ code plus 25k lines in development tools, this is looking like a fairly promising entrant into the open source RTS field. The screenshots are definitely pretty, to say the least."

mlinksva writes "A Wikipedia community vote is now underway on migrating to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as the main content license for Wikimedia Foundation projects. This would remove a legal barrier to reusing Wikipedia content (now under the Free Documentation License, intended for narrow use with software documentation, because Wikipedia started before CC existed) in other free culture projects and vice versa."

revealingheart writes "Plagiarism Today reports on the release of the Creative Commons Zero license, which allows you to waive copyright and related rights to your works, improving on the existing public domain dedication. This follows-on from their original announcement on CC0. The CC0 waiver system is a major step forward for the Creative Commons Organization in terms of their public domain efforts. Even though it isn't a true public domain dedication, it only waives the rights as far as they can be waived (Note: Moral rights, in many countries, can not be outright waived), it opens up what is likely as close to a public domain option as practical under the current legal climate."

revealingheart writes "Plagiarism Today reports on the release of the Creative Commons Zero license, which allows you to waive copyright and related rights to your works, improving on the existing public domain dedication. This follows-on from their original announcement on CC0. The CC0 waiver system is a major step forward for the Creative Commons Organization in terms of their public domain efforts. Even though it isn't a true public domain dedication, it only waives the rights as far as they can be waived (Note: Moral rights, in many countries, can not be outright waived), it opens up what is likely as close to a public domain option as practical under the current legal climate."

revealingheart writes "Plagiarism Today reports on the release of the Creative Commons Zero license, which allows you to waive copyright and related rights to your works, improving on the existing public domain dedication. This follows-on from their original announcement on CC0. The CC0 waiver system is a major step forward for the Creative Commons Organization in terms of their public domain efforts. Even though it isn't a true public domain dedication, it only waives the rights as far as they can be waived (Note: Moral rights, in many countries, can not be outright waived), it opens up what is likely as close to a public domain option as practical under the current legal climate."

northern squirrel writes "As reported by Security Focus, Google had publicly released their 50-page Browser Security Handbook (under a CC BY license, too). To quote, the document is 'meant to provide developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers,' and features a comparison of security features in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and — you guessed it — Chrome. Is it a belated Christmas gift to web developers, or just a reaction to recent bad publicity?"

Raul654 writes "The German Federal Archive has agreed to donate 100,000 images to Wikipedia under the German version of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License. These pictures cover a period from 1860 to present. This is the largest picture donation ever to Wikipedia, and possibly the largest in the history of the free culture movement." Apparently, this is part of a project which will eventually make 11 million photos available for public use.

David Gerard writes "Version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License is out (FAQ). This license is little-used, except on the #8 site in the world: Wikipedia. And this version includes special provisions to re-license wiki-based content from GFDL to the much simpler Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0, as requested by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia plans to hold a public consultation process to decide whether and how to migrate to CC-BY-SA. The discussion is already running hot and heavy."

Bennett Haselton contributes the following essay on the consequences of license choice as it applies to sites based on user contributions; read on below for more of his big idea for making Knol a more useful resource. "Google Knol should allow its writers to publish under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. The preceding sentence may not mean much to you, but if you've ever wanted to cite a Wikipedia article as a source, or simply read a Wikipedia article with some assurance that someone wasn't pulling your leg with some creative editing, or if you've wanted to contribute to Wikipedia but couldn't afford the time unless you received some modest compensation for it, then the addition of this one simple feature to Knol might make all the difference." (More below.)

I've been suggesting for some time that Wikipedia, or some fork of Wikipedia, should allow users to "sign off" on a version of an article, and then lock that article against future edits until the signer had approved them. The signing off would allow people to cite a Wikipedia article as a source that had been vetted by at least one person (with confidence in the source depending on that person's credentials). The signer's identity (and sometimes, their credentials) could be confirmed using several methods, such as verifying an .edu e-mail address. Users could still submit edits, but they would have to be approved by the article verifier. Different users could sign off on different versions of the same article, and readers would still have the option of viewing the latest version of an article, with all of its unmoderated edits (which is what you're looking at on Wikipedia most of the time).

Knol, which allows users to submit articles on any topic they want, has incorporated all of the above features (adding, for example, the ability to verify authors' real names using credit cards), and gone one step further by allowing users to place AdSense ads in their articles. However, there's one stumbling block to Knol incorporating all of Wikipedia's content and blessing it with the verification of credentialed experts: Currently, although you have to dig a bit deep to find this out, Knol's Terms of Service do not allow content to be copied from Wikipedia.

Content on Wikipedia is published under the GNU Free Documentation License -- when you click any of the "edit" links in a Wikipedia article and begin typing in new content, you're agreeing to submit your content under the terms of the GFDL. When you publish on Knol, on the other hand, your options are to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY), a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (CC-BY-NC), or a traditional "All Rights Reserved" copyright model. Both the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution licenses are popular with content creators who want to give content altruistically "to the world" -- these licenses all allow content to be redistributed freely without modification. The main difference is in the rights that they grant to people who want to create derivative works (modifying or expanding on the original work).

The GFDL is intended as a "viral" license -- if you take a work that is published under the GFDL, and publish a derivative work created from that, your derivative work must also be published under the terms of the GFDL -- that is, also allowing other users to redistribute your work freely and create derivative works from it as well. If a site mirrors Wikipedia articles without including the terms of the GFDL, Wikipedia encourages users to send notifications to those sites pointing out that they're violating Wikipedia's copyright, and if necessary to escalate the matter to their Web hosting provider for noncompliance. You can mirror Wikipedia all you want, and even put put ads all over your mirror site, but you cannot change the terms.

Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licenses, on the other hand, allow users to create derivative works and publish them under almost any terms they want, including an "All rights reserved" model, provided that they give attribution to the author of the original work. If Susan publishes an article under CC-BY, you can create a derivative work by expanding on her article, and -- assuming your contributions are substantial enough to be copyrightable in themselves -- you can prohibit other users from redistributing your article or creating derivative works from it, something that would not be possible if Susan had published her article under the GFDL. (Obviously, you cannot prohibit others from redistributing Susan's article or creating their own derivative works from it, but you can restrict these rights as applied to your own derivative work.)

Russell Potter, a Professor of English at Rhode Island College and a Citizendium contributor who explained this difference to me, points out that CC-BY licenses are more friendly to academics who want to reuse content in a published book or in a conference presentation. "Say an academic (me) contributes a long article on London's Crystal Palace," he wrote. "Others edit it in modest ways, but the article is still about 90% my own work. Perhaps I want to give a paper at a conference based on this entry, or use large bits of it in a book I'm writing. GFDL would have made either impossible." (Impossible, that is, unless the book publisher released the book under the GFDL, but most book publishing companies are reluctant to do that.)

And therein lies the logical incompatibility between the GFDL and the CC-BY publishing options currently allowed by Knol. If you copy GFDL-licensed content from Wikipedia, you are agreeing that for any copies or derivative works that you create, you will not only permit other users to remix them, but that you will require those other users to agree to the same terms for the remixed works that they publish. If you published such content on Knol under the CC-BY option, you would be granting the reader permission to incorporate the work into their own derivative work which they could then publish under an All Rights Reserved license. And the GFDL doesn't allow you to grant that permission to the reader. Section 5.5 of Knol's Terms of Service explicitly states that GFDL content cannot be re-published under a CC-BY license, and Mike Linksvayer makes this point on the Creative Commons blog as well. Some authors have begun copying Wikipedia content to Knol anyway, and even though that particular article included a link to the GFDL, users have pointed out in the comments that it's still a TOS violation anyway. Google appears to be lax about policing these violations for now, but in the right-hand column, the links to "Similar Content on the Web" show that Google can trivially detect if content is copied from other sites, and may be planning to remove such content or demote it in search results if it's copied from a site like Wikipedia that doesn't allow copying under Knol's terms.

However, the Creative Commons family of licenses also includes the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA), which is written in the same spirit as the GFDL -- if a work is released under CC-BY-SA, any published derivative works created from that work must also be released under the same license. In fact the Free Software Foundation, which writes new versions of the GFDL, announced in December 2007 their intention to make the next version of the GFDL explicitly compatible with CC-BY-SA, so that any work published under the GFDL can be incorporated into a work published under CC-BY-SA, and vice versa. This new version of the GFDL has not been released yet, but the FSF replied by e-mail to say they're working on it.

(Perhaps you might be wondering, as I did, how already-existing content on Wikipedia can be said to be "licensed" under a new version of the GFDL when it comes out. How can past Wikipedia contributors have agreed to a future version of the license that didn't exist yet? The answer is that when you submit edits on Wikipedia, you're agreeing to submit your edits under the "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version", and it's the "or any later version" that means contributors are deemed to have agreed to the next version of the GFDL, which will presumably be CC-BY-SA-compatible.)

If Google Knol adds the ability to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, and the FSF releases a new version of the GFDL that is compatible with this license, then I think we will finally see what I hoped for in February 2008 -- a "gold rush" of users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol, where it can be verified by credentialed users and protected against vandalism. Some users' verifications will be more valuable than others -- a physics article verified by a physics professor is more trustworthy than the same article verified by an anonymous user, and even an article about The X-Files may be more trustworthy when it's verified by a physics professor, not because it's the professor's area of expertise, but because a professor with a valued reputation would be less likely to sign their name to unverified garbage.

Will Knol add the Share Alike option? Perhaps they may be nervous about what would happen if they allowed unlimited copying from Wikipedia, especially with financial incentives. At the moment, Knol seems to be downplaying the fact that you can make money from writing articles, even as everyone else buzzes about it. On their front page, under "Learn More", Knol lists the reasons you should contribute: "Visibility - We value and promote authorship. Great content will be visible on any search engine. Community - You can connect with other experts in your area of interest to share and grow knowledge," etc. Really? That's all? AdSense isn't mentioned in the FAQ, and only briefly at the end of a posting about "Knol bugs and workarounds". And officially the site never mentions Wikipedia at all, except in the knols about it.

But many of the articles on Wikipedia -- especially the kind of articles that academics would be willing to sign their names to -- would probably enhance the Knol site, not drag it down. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales correctly predicted that Knol would generate a lot of articles about Viagra. If Knol can tolerate that garbage (and under their own policies, there is little grounds for removing those articles, unless the authors lifted the content from some other site), they should welcome the addition of articles about stochiometry, Shakespeare, and Serbia, even if they were copied from Wikipedia and then vetted by a university professor or journalist. (None of those topics have their own Knol yet, although there was room for Knols about Simon Cowell, Superman, and sex addiction.)

After all, the incentives that AdSense creates for Knol writers are roughly the same as the incentives for Web publishers in general -- you can try to turn a quick buck, or you can invest in your site's reputation for the long run -- and while there is a new "made-for-AdSense" site born every minute, few would disagree that the rise of AdSense has been good for content on the Web in general.

While copying from Wikipedia to Knol is against the rules right now, there's no reason in principle to be against creating a Wikipedia sub-fork on Knol, if Google allows Knol writers to select the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike publishing option. One user, responding to the unauthorized use of Wikipedia articles, posted in the Knol users' group on Google Groups: "What I REALLY want to see Google do is crack down on these clowns who are copying and pasting articles from Wikipedia." I say, just change the rules and send in the clowns.

Slashdot welcomes original submissions; many thanks to Bennett for this one.

Bennett Haselton contributes the following essay on the consequences of license choice as it applies to sites based on user contributions; read on below for more of his big idea for making Knol a more useful resource. "Google Knol should allow its writers to publish under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. The preceding sentence may not mean much to you, but if you've ever wanted to cite a Wikipedia article as a source, or simply read a Wikipedia article with some assurance that someone wasn't pulling your leg with some creative editing, or if you've wanted to contribute to Wikipedia but couldn't afford the time unless you received some modest compensation for it, then the addition of this one simple feature to Knol might make all the difference." (More below.)

I've been suggesting for some time that Wikipedia, or some fork of Wikipedia, should allow users to "sign off" on a version of an article, and then lock that article against future edits until the signer had approved them. The signing off would allow people to cite a Wikipedia article as a source that had been vetted by at least one person (with confidence in the source depending on that person's credentials). The signer's identity (and sometimes, their credentials) could be confirmed using several methods, such as verifying an .edu e-mail address. Users could still submit edits, but they would have to be approved by the article verifier. Different users could sign off on different versions of the same article, and readers would still have the option of viewing the latest version of an article, with all of its unmoderated edits (which is what you're looking at on Wikipedia most of the time).

Knol, which allows users to submit articles on any topic they want, has incorporated all of the above features (adding, for example, the ability to verify authors' real names using credit cards), and gone one step further by allowing users to place AdSense ads in their articles. However, there's one stumbling block to Knol incorporating all of Wikipedia's content and blessing it with the verification of credentialed experts: Currently, although you have to dig a bit deep to find this out, Knol's Terms of Service do not allow content to be copied from Wikipedia.

Content on Wikipedia is published under the GNU Free Documentation License -- when you click any of the "edit" links in a Wikipedia article and begin typing in new content, you're agreeing to submit your content under the terms of the GFDL. When you publish on Knol, on the other hand, your options are to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY), a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (CC-BY-NC), or a traditional "All Rights Reserved" copyright model. Both the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution licenses are popular with content creators who want to give content altruistically "to the world" -- these licenses all allow content to be redistributed freely without modification. The main difference is in the rights that they grant to people who want to create derivative works (modifying or expanding on the original work).

The GFDL is intended as a "viral" license -- if you take a work that is published under the GFDL, and publish a derivative work created from that, your derivative work must also be published under the terms of the GFDL -- that is, also allowing other users to redistribute your work freely and create derivative works from it as well. If a site mirrors Wikipedia articles without including the terms of the GFDL, Wikipedia encourages users to send notifications to those sites pointing out that they're violating Wikipedia's copyright, and if necessary to escalate the matter to their Web hosting provider for noncompliance. You can mirror Wikipedia all you want, and even put put ads all over your mirror site, but you cannot change the terms.

Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licenses, on the other hand, allow users to create derivative works and publish them under almost any terms they want, including an "All rights reserved" model, provided that they give attribution to the author of the original work. If Susan publishes an article under CC-BY, you can create a derivative work by expanding on her article, and -- assuming your contributions are substantial enough to be copyrightable in themselves -- you can prohibit other users from redistributing your article or creating derivative works from it, something that would not be possible if Susan had published her article under the GFDL. (Obviously, you cannot prohibit others from redistributing Susan's article or creating their own derivative works from it, but you can restrict these rights as applied to your own derivative work.)

Russell Potter, a Professor of English at Rhode Island College and a Citizendium contributor who explained this difference to me, points out that CC-BY licenses are more friendly to academics who want to reuse content in a published book or in a conference presentation. "Say an academic (me) contributes a long article on London's Crystal Palace," he wrote. "Others edit it in modest ways, but the article is still about 90% my own work. Perhaps I want to give a paper at a conference based on this entry, or use large bits of it in a book I'm writing. GFDL would have made either impossible." (Impossible, that is, unless the book publisher released the book under the GFDL, but most book publishing companies are reluctant to do that.)

And therein lies the logical incompatibility between the GFDL and the CC-BY publishing options currently allowed by Knol. If you copy GFDL-licensed content from Wikipedia, you are agreeing that for any copies or derivative works that you create, you will not only permit other users to remix them, but that you will require those other users to agree to the same terms for the remixed works that they publish. If you published such content on Knol under the CC-BY option, you would be granting the reader permission to incorporate the work into their own derivative work which they could then publish under an All Rights Reserved license. And the GFDL doesn't allow you to grant that permission to the reader. Section 5.5 of Knol's Terms of Service explicitly states that GFDL content cannot be re-published under a CC-BY license, and Mike Linksvayer makes this point on the Creative Commons blog as well. Some authors have begun copying Wikipedia content to Knol anyway, and even though that particular article included a link to the GFDL, users have pointed out in the comments that it's still a TOS violation anyway. Google appears to be lax about policing these violations for now, but in the right-hand column, the links to "Similar Content on the Web" show that Google can trivially detect if content is copied from other sites, and may be planning to remove such content or demote it in search results if it's copied from a site like Wikipedia that doesn't allow copying under Knol's terms.

However, the Creative Commons family of licenses also includes the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA), which is written in the same spirit as the GFDL -- if a work is released under CC-BY-SA, any published derivative works created from that work must also be released under the same license. In fact the Free Software Foundation, which writes new versions of the GFDL, announced in December 2007 their intention to make the next version of the GFDL explicitly compatible with CC-BY-SA, so that any work published under the GFDL can be incorporated into a work published under CC-BY-SA, and vice versa. This new version of the GFDL has not been released yet, but the FSF replied by e-mail to say they're working on it.

(Perhaps you might be wondering, as I did, how already-existing content on Wikipedia can be said to be "licensed" under a new version of the GFDL when it comes out. How can past Wikipedia contributors have agreed to a future version of the license that didn't exist yet? The answer is that when you submit edits on Wikipedia, you're agreeing to submit your edits under the "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version", and it's the "or any later version" that means contributors are deemed to have agreed to the next version of the GFDL, which will presumably be CC-BY-SA-compatible.)

If Google Knol adds the ability to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, and the FSF releases a new version of the GFDL that is compatible with this license, then I think we will finally see what I hoped for in February 2008 -- a "gold rush" of users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol, where it can be verified by credentialed users and protected against vandalism. Some users' verifications will be more valuable than others -- a physics article verified by a physics professor is more trustworthy than the same article verified by an anonymous user, and even an article about The X-Files may be more trustworthy when it's verified by a physics professor, not because it's the professor's area of expertise, but because a professor with a valued reputation would be less likely to sign their name to unverified garbage.

Will Knol add the Share Alike option? Perhaps they may be nervous about what would happen if they allowed unlimited copying from Wikipedia, especially with financial incentives. At the moment, Knol seems to be downplaying the fact that you can make money from writing articles, even as everyone else buzzes about it. On their front page, under "Learn More", Knol lists the reasons you should contribute: "Visibility - We value and promote authorship. Great content will be visible on any search engine. Community - You can connect with other experts in your area of interest to share and grow knowledge," etc. Really? That's all? AdSense isn't mentioned in the FAQ, and only briefly at the end of a posting about "Knol bugs and workarounds". And officially the site never mentions Wikipedia at all, except in the knols about it.

But many of the articles on Wikipedia -- especially the kind of articles that academics would be willing to sign their names to -- would probably enhance the Knol site, not drag it down. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales correctly predicted that Knol would generate a lot of articles about Viagra. If Knol can tolerate that garbage (and under their own policies, there is little grounds for removing those articles, unless the authors lifted the content from some other site), they should welcome the addition of articles about stochiometry, Shakespeare, and Serbia, even if they were copied from Wikipedia and then vetted by a university professor or journalist. (None of those topics have their own Knol yet, although there was room for Knols about Simon Cowell, Superman, and sex addiction.)

After all, the incentives that AdSense creates for Knol writers are roughly the same as the incentives for Web publishers in general -- you can try to turn a quick buck, or you can invest in your site's reputation for the long run -- and while there is a new "made-for-AdSense" site born every minute, few would disagree that the rise of AdSense has been good for content on the Web in general.

While copying from Wikipedia to Knol is against the rules right now, there's no reason in principle to be against creating a Wikipedia sub-fork on Knol, if Google allows Knol writers to select the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike publishing option. One user, responding to the unauthorized use of Wikipedia articles, posted in the Knol users' group on Google Groups: "What I REALLY want to see Google do is crack down on these clowns who are copying and pasting articles from Wikipedia." I say, just change the rules and send in the clowns.

Slashdot welcomes original submissions; many thanks to Bennett for this one.

Bennett Haselton contributes the following essay on the consequences of license choice as it applies to sites based on user contributions; read on below for more of his big idea for making Knol a more useful resource. "Google Knol should allow its writers to publish under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. The preceding sentence may not mean much to you, but if you've ever wanted to cite a Wikipedia article as a source, or simply read a Wikipedia article with some assurance that someone wasn't pulling your leg with some creative editing, or if you've wanted to contribute to Wikipedia but couldn't afford the time unless you received some modest compensation for it, then the addition of this one simple feature to Knol might make all the difference." (More below.)

I've been suggesting for some time that Wikipedia, or some fork of Wikipedia, should allow users to "sign off" on a version of an article, and then lock that article against future edits until the signer had approved them. The signing off would allow people to cite a Wikipedia article as a source that had been vetted by at least one person (with confidence in the source depending on that person's credentials). The signer's identity (and sometimes, their credentials) could be confirmed using several methods, such as verifying an .edu e-mail address. Users could still submit edits, but they would have to be approved by the article verifier. Different users could sign off on different versions of the same article, and readers would still have the option of viewing the latest version of an article, with all of its unmoderated edits (which is what you're looking at on Wikipedia most of the time).

Knol, which allows users to submit articles on any topic they want, has incorporated all of the above features (adding, for example, the ability to verify authors' real names using credit cards), and gone one step further by allowing users to place AdSense ads in their articles. However, there's one stumbling block to Knol incorporating all of Wikipedia's content and blessing it with the verification of credentialed experts: Currently, although you have to dig a bit deep to find this out, Knol's Terms of Service do not allow content to be copied from Wikipedia.

Content on Wikipedia is published under the GNU Free Documentation License -- when you click any of the "edit" links in a Wikipedia article and begin typing in new content, you're agreeing to submit your content under the terms of the GFDL. When you publish on Knol, on the other hand, your options are to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY), a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (CC-BY-NC), or a traditional "All Rights Reserved" copyright model. Both the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution licenses are popular with content creators who want to give content altruistically "to the world" -- these licenses all allow content to be redistributed freely without modification. The main difference is in the rights that they grant to people who want to create derivative works (modifying or expanding on the original work).

The GFDL is intended as a "viral" license -- if you take a work that is published under the GFDL, and publish a derivative work created from that, your derivative work must also be published under the terms of the GFDL -- that is, also allowing other users to redistribute your work freely and create derivative works from it as well. If a site mirrors Wikipedia articles without including the terms of the GFDL, Wikipedia encourages users to send notifications to those sites pointing out that they're violating Wikipedia's copyright, and if necessary to escalate the matter to their Web hosting provider for noncompliance. You can mirror Wikipedia all you want, and even put put ads all over your mirror site, but you cannot change the terms.

Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licenses, on the other hand, allow users to create derivative works and publish them under almost any terms they want, including an "All rights reserved" model, provided that they give attribution to the author of the original work. If Susan publishes an article under CC-BY, you can create a derivative work by expanding on her article, and -- assuming your contributions are substantial enough to be copyrightable in themselves -- you can prohibit other users from redistributing your article or creating derivative works from it, something that would not be possible if Susan had published her article under the GFDL. (Obviously, you cannot prohibit others from redistributing Susan's article or creating their own derivative works from it, but you can restrict these rights as applied to your own derivative work.)

Russell Potter, a Professor of English at Rhode Island College and a Citizendium contributor who explained this difference to me, points out that CC-BY licenses are more friendly to academics who want to reuse content in a published book or in a conference presentation. "Say an academic (me) contributes a long article on London's Crystal Palace," he wrote. "Others edit it in modest ways, but the article is still about 90% my own work. Perhaps I want to give a paper at a conference based on this entry, or use large bits of it in a book I'm writing. GFDL would have made either impossible." (Impossible, that is, unless the book publisher released the book under the GFDL, but most book publishing companies are reluctant to do that.)

And therein lies the logical incompatibility between the GFDL and the CC-BY publishing options currently allowed by Knol. If you copy GFDL-licensed content from Wikipedia, you are agreeing that for any copies or derivative works that you create, you will not only permit other users to remix them, but that you will require those other users to agree to the same terms for the remixed works that they publish. If you published such content on Knol under the CC-BY option, you would be granting the reader permission to incorporate the work into their own derivative work which they could then publish under an All Rights Reserved license. And the GFDL doesn't allow you to grant that permission to the reader. Section 5.5 of Knol's Terms of Service explicitly states that GFDL content cannot be re-published under a CC-BY license, and Mike Linksvayer makes this point on the Creative Commons blog as well. Some authors have begun copying Wikipedia content to Knol anyway, and even though that particular article included a link to the GFDL, users have pointed out in the comments that it's still a TOS violation anyway. Google appears to be lax about policing these violations for now, but in the right-hand column, the links to "Similar Content on the Web" show that Google can trivially detect if content is copied from other sites, and may be planning to remove such content or demote it in search results if it's copied from a site like Wikipedia that doesn't allow copying under Knol's terms.

However, the Creative Commons family of licenses also includes the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA), which is written in the same spirit as the GFDL -- if a work is released under CC-BY-SA, any published derivative works created from that work must also be released under the same license. In fact the Free Software Foundation, which writes new versions of the GFDL, announced in December 2007 their intention to make the next version of the GFDL explicitly compatible with CC-BY-SA, so that any work published under the GFDL can be incorporated into a work published under CC-BY-SA, and vice versa. This new version of the GFDL has not been released yet, but the FSF replied by e-mail to say they're working on it.

(Perhaps you might be wondering, as I did, how already-existing content on Wikipedia can be said to be "licensed" under a new version of the GFDL when it comes out. How can past Wikipedia contributors have agreed to a future version of the license that didn't exist yet? The answer is that when you submit edits on Wikipedia, you're agreeing to submit your edits under the "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version", and it's the "or any later version" that means contributors are deemed to have agreed to the next version of the GFDL, which will presumably be CC-BY-SA-compatible.)

If Google Knol adds the ability to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, and the FSF releases a new version of the GFDL that is compatible with this license, then I think we will finally see what I hoped for in February 2008 -- a "gold rush" of users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol, where it can be verified by credentialed users and protected against vandalism. Some users' verifications will be more valuable than others -- a physics article verified by a physics professor is more trustworthy than the same article verified by an anonymous user, and even an article about The X-Files may be more trustworthy when it's verified by a physics professor, not because it's the professor's area of expertise, but because a professor with a valued reputation would be less likely to sign their name to unverified garbage.

Will Knol add the Share Alike option? Perhaps they may be nervous about what would happen if they allowed unlimited copying from Wikipedia, especially with financial incentives. At the moment, Knol seems to be downplaying the fact that you can make money from writing articles, even as everyone else buzzes about it. On their front page, under "Learn More", Knol lists the reasons you should contribute: "Visibility - We value and promote authorship. Great content will be visible on any search engine. Community - You can connect with other experts in your area of interest to share and grow knowledge," etc. Really? That's all? AdSense isn't mentioned in the FAQ, and only briefly at the end of a posting about "Knol bugs and workarounds". And officially the site never mentions Wikipedia at all, except in the knols about it.

But many of the articles on Wikipedia -- especially the kind of articles that academics would be willing to sign their names to -- would probably enhance the Knol site, not drag it down. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales correctly predicted that Knol would generate a lot of articles about Viagra. If Knol can tolerate that garbage (and under their own policies, there is little grounds for removing those articles, unless the authors lifted the content from some other site), they should welcome the addition of articles about stochiometry, Shakespeare, and Serbia, even if they were copied from Wikipedia and then vetted by a university professor or journalist. (None of those topics have their own Knol yet, although there was room for Knols about Simon Cowell, Superman, and sex addiction.)

After all, the incentives that AdSense creates for Knol writers are roughly the same as the incentives for Web publishers in general -- you can try to turn a quick buck, or you can invest in your site's reputation for the long run -- and while there is a new "made-for-AdSense" site born every minute, few would disagree that the rise of AdSense has been good for content on the Web in general.

While copying from Wikipedia to Knol is against the rules right now, there's no reason in principle to be against creating a Wikipedia sub-fork on Knol, if Google allows Knol writers to select the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike publishing option. One user, responding to the unauthorized use of Wikipedia articles, posted in the Knol users' group on Google Groups: "What I REALLY want to see Google do is crack down on these clowns who are copying and pasting articles from Wikipedia." I say, just change the rules and send in the clowns.

Slashdot welcomes original submissions; many thanks to Bennett for this one.

Bennett Haselton contributes the following essay on the consequences of license choice as it applies to sites based on user contributions; read on below for more of his big idea for making Knol a more useful resource. "Google Knol should allow its writers to publish under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. The preceding sentence may not mean much to you, but if you've ever wanted to cite a Wikipedia article as a source, or simply read a Wikipedia article with some assurance that someone wasn't pulling your leg with some creative editing, or if you've wanted to contribute to Wikipedia but couldn't afford the time unless you received some modest compensation for it, then the addition of this one simple feature to Knol might make all the difference." (More below.)

I've been suggesting for some time that Wikipedia, or some fork of Wikipedia, should allow users to "sign off" on a version of an article, and then lock that article against future edits until the signer had approved them. The signing off would allow people to cite a Wikipedia article as a source that had been vetted by at least one person (with confidence in the source depending on that person's credentials). The signer's identity (and sometimes, their credentials) could be confirmed using several methods, such as verifying an .edu e-mail address. Users could still submit edits, but they would have to be approved by the article verifier. Different users could sign off on different versions of the same article, and readers would still have the option of viewing the latest version of an article, with all of its unmoderated edits (which is what you're looking at on Wikipedia most of the time).

Knol, which allows users to submit articles on any topic they want, has incorporated all of the above features (adding, for example, the ability to verify authors' real names using credit cards), and gone one step further by allowing users to place AdSense ads in their articles. However, there's one stumbling block to Knol incorporating all of Wikipedia's content and blessing it with the verification of credentialed experts: Currently, although you have to dig a bit deep to find this out, Knol's Terms of Service do not allow content to be copied from Wikipedia.

Content on Wikipedia is published under the GNU Free Documentation License -- when you click any of the "edit" links in a Wikipedia article and begin typing in new content, you're agreeing to submit your content under the terms of the GFDL. When you publish on Knol, on the other hand, your options are to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY), a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (CC-BY-NC), or a traditional "All Rights Reserved" copyright model. Both the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution licenses are popular with content creators who want to give content altruistically "to the world" -- these licenses all allow content to be redistributed freely without modification. The main difference is in the rights that they grant to people who want to create derivative works (modifying or expanding on the original work).

The GFDL is intended as a "viral" license -- if you take a work that is published under the GFDL, and publish a derivative work created from that, your derivative work must also be published under the terms of the GFDL -- that is, also allowing other users to redistribute your work freely and create derivative works from it as well. If a site mirrors Wikipedia articles without including the terms of the GFDL, Wikipedia encourages users to send notifications to those sites pointing out that they're violating Wikipedia's copyright, and if necessary to escalate the matter to their Web hosting provider for noncompliance. You can mirror Wikipedia all you want, and even put put ads all over your mirror site, but you cannot change the terms.

Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licenses, on the other hand, allow users to create derivative works and publish them under almost any terms they want, including an "All rights reserved" model, provided that they give attribution to the author of the original work. If Susan publishes an article under CC-BY, you can create a derivative work by expanding on her article, and -- assuming your contributions are substantial enough to be copyrightable in themselves -- you can prohibit other users from redistributing your article or creating derivative works from it, something that would not be possible if Susan had published her article under the GFDL. (Obviously, you cannot prohibit others from redistributing Susan's article or creating their own derivative works from it, but you can restrict these rights as applied to your own derivative work.)

Russell Potter, a Professor of English at Rhode Island College and a Citizendium contributor who explained this difference to me, points out that CC-BY licenses are more friendly to academics who want to reuse content in a published book or in a conference presentation. "Say an academic (me) contributes a long article on London's Crystal Palace," he wrote. "Others edit it in modest ways, but the article is still about 90% my own work. Perhaps I want to give a paper at a conference based on this entry, or use large bits of it in a book I'm writing. GFDL would have made either impossible." (Impossible, that is, unless the book publisher released the book under the GFDL, but most book publishing companies are reluctant to do that.)

And therein lies the logical incompatibility between the GFDL and the CC-BY publishing options currently allowed by Knol. If you copy GFDL-licensed content from Wikipedia, you are agreeing that for any copies or derivative works that you create, you will not only permit other users to remix them, but that you will require those other users to agree to the same terms for the remixed works that they publish. If you published such content on Knol under the CC-BY option, you would be granting the reader permission to incorporate the work into their own derivative work which they could then publish under an All Rights Reserved license. And the GFDL doesn't allow you to grant that permission to the reader. Section 5.5 of Knol's Terms of Service explicitly states that GFDL content cannot be re-published under a CC-BY license, and Mike Linksvayer makes this point on the Creative Commons blog as well. Some authors have begun copying Wikipedia content to Knol anyway, and even though that particular article included a link to the GFDL, users have pointed out in the comments that it's still a TOS violation anyway. Google appears to be lax about policing these violations for now, but in the right-hand column, the links to "Similar Content on the Web" show that Google can trivially detect if content is copied from other sites, and may be planning to remove such content or demote it in search results if it's copied from a site like Wikipedia that doesn't allow copying under Knol's terms.

However, the Creative Commons family of licenses also includes the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA), which is written in the same spirit as the GFDL -- if a work is released under CC-BY-SA, any published derivative works created from that work must also be released under the same license. In fact the Free Software Foundation, which writes new versions of the GFDL, announced in December 2007 their intention to make the next version of the GFDL explicitly compatible with CC-BY-SA, so that any work published under the GFDL can be incorporated into a work published under CC-BY-SA, and vice versa. This new version of the GFDL has not been released yet, but the FSF replied by e-mail to say they're working on it.

(Perhaps you might be wondering, as I did, how already-existing content on Wikipedia can be said to be "licensed" under a new version of the GFDL when it comes out. How can past Wikipedia contributors have agreed to a future version of the license that didn't exist yet? The answer is that when you submit edits on Wikipedia, you're agreeing to submit your edits under the "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version", and it's the "or any later version" that means contributors are deemed to have agreed to the next version of the GFDL, which will presumably be CC-BY-SA-compatible.)

If Google Knol adds the ability to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, and the FSF releases a new version of the GFDL that is compatible with this license, then I think we will finally see what I hoped for in February 2008 -- a "gold rush" of users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol, where it can be verified by credentialed users and protected against vandalism. Some users' verifications will be more valuable than others -- a physics article verified by a physics professor is more trustworthy than the same article verified by an anonymous user, and even an article about The X-Files may be more trustworthy when it's verified by a physics professor, not because it's the professor's area of expertise, but because a professor with a valued reputation would be less likely to sign their name to unverified garbage.

Will Knol add the Share Alike option? Perhaps they may be nervous about what would happen if they allowed unlimited copying from Wikipedia, especially with financial incentives. At the moment, Knol seems to be downplaying the fact that you can make money from writing articles, even as everyone else buzzes about it. On their front page, under "Learn More", Knol lists the reasons you should contribute: "Visibility - We value and promote authorship. Great content will be visible on any search engine. Community - You can connect with other experts in your area of interest to share and grow knowledge," etc. Really? That's all? AdSense isn't mentioned in the FAQ, and only briefly at the end of a posting about "Knol bugs and workarounds". And officially the site never mentions Wikipedia at all, except in the knols about it.

But many of the articles on Wikipedia -- especially the kind of articles that academics would be willing to sign their names to -- would probably enhance the Knol site, not drag it down. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales correctly predicted that Knol would generate a lot of articles about Viagra. If Knol can tolerate that garbage (and under their own policies, there is little grounds for removing those articles, unless the authors lifted the content from some other site), they should welcome the addition of articles about stochiometry, Shakespeare, and Serbia, even if they were copied from Wikipedia and then vetted by a university professor or journalist. (None of those topics have their own Knol yet, although there was room for Knols about Simon Cowell, Superman, and sex addiction.)

After all, the incentives that AdSense creates for Knol writers are roughly the same as the incentives for Web publishers in general -- you can try to turn a quick buck, or you can invest in your site's reputation for the long run -- and while there is a new "made-for-AdSense" site born every minute, few would disagree that the rise of AdSense has been good for content on the Web in general.

While copying from Wikipedia to Knol is against the rules right now, there's no reason in principle to be against creating a Wikipedia sub-fork on Knol, if Google allows Knol writers to select the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike publishing option. One user, responding to the unauthorized use of Wikipedia articles, posted in the Knol users' group on Google Groups: "What I REALLY want to see Google do is crack down on these clowns who are copying and pasting articles from Wikipedia." I say, just change the rules and send in the clowns.

Slashdot welcomes original submissions; many thanks to Bennett for this one.

Bennett Haselton contributes the following essay on the consequences of license choice as it applies to sites based on user contributions; read on below for more of his big idea for making Knol a more useful resource. "Google Knol should allow its writers to publish under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. The preceding sentence may not mean much to you, but if you've ever wanted to cite a Wikipedia article as a source, or simply read a Wikipedia article with some assurance that someone wasn't pulling your leg with some creative editing, or if you've wanted to contribute to Wikipedia but couldn't afford the time unless you received some modest compensation for it, then the addition of this one simple feature to Knol might make all the difference." (More below.)

I've been suggesting for some time that Wikipedia, or some fork of Wikipedia, should allow users to "sign off" on a version of an article, and then lock that article against future edits until the signer had approved them. The signing off would allow people to cite a Wikipedia article as a source that had been vetted by at least one person (with confidence in the source depending on that person's credentials). The signer's identity (and sometimes, their credentials) could be confirmed using several methods, such as verifying an .edu e-mail address. Users could still submit edits, but they would have to be approved by the article verifier. Different users could sign off on different versions of the same article, and readers would still have the option of viewing the latest version of an article, with all of its unmoderated edits (which is what you're looking at on Wikipedia most of the time).

Knol, which allows users to submit articles on any topic they want, has incorporated all of the above features (adding, for example, the ability to verify authors' real names using credit cards), and gone one step further by allowing users to place AdSense ads in their articles. However, there's one stumbling block to Knol incorporating all of Wikipedia's content and blessing it with the verification of credentialed experts: Currently, although you have to dig a bit deep to find this out, Knol's Terms of Service do not allow content to be copied from Wikipedia.

Content on Wikipedia is published under the GNU Free Documentation License -- when you click any of the "edit" links in a Wikipedia article and begin typing in new content, you're agreeing to submit your content under the terms of the GFDL. When you publish on Knol, on the other hand, your options are to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY), a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (CC-BY-NC), or a traditional "All Rights Reserved" copyright model. Both the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution licenses are popular with content creators who want to give content altruistically "to the world" -- these licenses all allow content to be redistributed freely without modification. The main difference is in the rights that they grant to people who want to create derivative works (modifying or expanding on the original work).

The GFDL is intended as a "viral" license -- if you take a work that is published under the GFDL, and publish a derivative work created from that, your derivative work must also be published under the terms of the GFDL -- that is, also allowing other users to redistribute your work freely and create derivative works from it as well. If a site mirrors Wikipedia articles without including the terms of the GFDL, Wikipedia encourages users to send notifications to those sites pointing out that they're violating Wikipedia's copyright, and if necessary to escalate the matter to their Web hosting provider for noncompliance. You can mirror Wikipedia all you want, and even put put ads all over your mirror site, but you cannot change the terms.

Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licenses, on the other hand, allow users to create derivative works and publish them under almost any terms they want, including an "All rights reserved" model, provided that they give attribution to the author of the original work. If Susan publishes an article under CC-BY, you can create a derivative work by expanding on her article, and -- assuming your contributions are substantial enough to be copyrightable in themselves -- you can prohibit other users from redistributing your article or creating derivative works from it, something that would not be possible if Susan had published her article under the GFDL. (Obviously, you cannot prohibit others from redistributing Susan's article or creating their own derivative works from it, but you can restrict these rights as applied to your own derivative work.)

Russell Potter, a Professor of English at Rhode Island College and a Citizendium contributor who explained this difference to me, points out that CC-BY licenses are more friendly to academics who want to reuse content in a published book or in a conference presentation. "Say an academic (me) contributes a long article on London's Crystal Palace," he wrote. "Others edit it in modest ways, but the article is still about 90% my own work. Perhaps I want to give a paper at a conference based on this entry, or use large bits of it in a book I'm writing. GFDL would have made either impossible." (Impossible, that is, unless the book publisher released the book under the GFDL, but most book publishing companies are reluctant to do that.)

And therein lies the logical incompatibility between the GFDL and the CC-BY publishing options currently allowed by Knol. If you copy GFDL-licensed content from Wikipedia, you are agreeing that for any copies or derivative works that you create, you will not only permit other users to remix them, but that you will require those other users to agree to the same terms for the remixed works that they publish. If you published such content on Knol under the CC-BY option, you would be granting the reader permission to incorporate the work into their own derivative work which they could then publish under an All Rights Reserved license. And the GFDL doesn't allow you to grant that permission to the reader. Section 5.5 of Knol's Terms of Service explicitly states that GFDL content cannot be re-published under a CC-BY license, and Mike Linksvayer makes this point on the Creative Commons blog as well. Some authors have begun copying Wikipedia content to Knol anyway, and even though that particular article included a link to the GFDL, users have pointed out in the comments that it's still a TOS violation anyway. Google appears to be lax about policing these violations for now, but in the right-hand column, the links to "Similar Content on the Web" show that Google can trivially detect if content is copied from other sites, and may be planning to remove such content or demote it in search results if it's copied from a site like Wikipedia that doesn't allow copying under Knol's terms.

However, the Creative Commons family of licenses also includes the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA), which is written in the same spirit as the GFDL -- if a work is released under CC-BY-SA, any published derivative works created from that work must also be released under the same license. In fact the Free Software Foundation, which writes new versions of the GFDL, announced in December 2007 their intention to make the next version of the GFDL explicitly compatible with CC-BY-SA, so that any work published under the GFDL can be incorporated into a work published under CC-BY-SA, and vice versa. This new version of the GFDL has not been released yet, but the FSF replied by e-mail to say they're working on it.

(Perhaps you might be wondering, as I did, how already-existing content on Wikipedia can be said to be "licensed" under a new version of the GFDL when it comes out. How can past Wikipedia contributors have agreed to a future version of the license that didn't exist yet? The answer is that when you submit edits on Wikipedia, you're agreeing to submit your edits under the "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version", and it's the "or any later version" that means contributors are deemed to have agreed to the next version of the GFDL, which will presumably be CC-BY-SA-compatible.)

If Google Knol adds the ability to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, and the FSF releases a new version of the GFDL that is compatible with this license, then I think we will finally see what I hoped for in February 2008 -- a "gold rush" of users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol, where it can be verified by credentialed users and protected against vandalism. Some users' verifications will be more valuable than others -- a physics article verified by a physics professor is more trustworthy than the same article verified by an anonymous user, and even an article about The X-Files may be more trustworthy when it's verified by a physics professor, not because it's the professor's area of expertise, but because a professor with a valued reputation would be less likely to sign their name to unverified garbage.

Will Knol add the Share Alike option? Perhaps they may be nervous about what would happen if they allowed unlimited copying from Wikipedia, especially with financial incentives. At the moment, Knol seems to be downplaying the fact that you can make money from writing articles, even as everyone else buzzes about it. On their front page, under "Learn More", Knol lists the reasons you should contribute: "Visibility - We value and promote authorship. Great content will be visible on any search engine. Community - You can connect with other experts in your area of interest to share and grow knowledge," etc. Really? That's all? AdSense isn't mentioned in the FAQ, and only briefly at the end of a posting about "Knol bugs and workarounds". And officially the site never mentions Wikipedia at all, except in the knols about it.

But many of the articles on Wikipedia -- especially the kind of articles that academics would be willing to sign their names to -- would probably enhance the Knol site, not drag it down. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales correctly predicted that Knol would generate a lot of articles about Viagra. If Knol can tolerate that garbage (and under their own policies, there is little grounds for removing those articles, unless the authors lifted the content from some other site), they should welcome the addition of articles about stochiometry, Shakespeare, and Serbia, even if they were copied from Wikipedia and then vetted by a university professor or journalist. (None of those topics have their own Knol yet, although there was room for Knols about Simon Cowell, Superman, and sex addiction.)

After all, the incentives that AdSense creates for Knol writers are roughly the same as the incentives for Web publishers in general -- you can try to turn a quick buck, or you can invest in your site's reputation for the long run -- and while there is a new "made-for-AdSense" site born every minute, few would disagree that the rise of AdSense has been good for content on the Web in general.

While copying from Wikipedia to Knol is against the rules right now, there's no reason in principle to be against creating a Wikipedia sub-fork on Knol, if Google allows Knol writers to select the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike publishing option. One user, responding to the unauthorized use of Wikipedia articles, posted in the Knol users' group on Google Groups: "What I REALLY want to see Google do is crack down on these clowns who are copying and pasting articles from Wikipedia." I say, just change the rules and send in the clowns.

Slashdot welcomes original submissions; many thanks to Bennett for this one.

DeviceGuru writes "Stanford University will soon begin offering a series of 10 free, online computer science and electrical engineering courses. Initial courses will provide an introduction to computer science and an introduction to field of robotics, among other topics. The courses, offered under the auspices of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE), are nearly identical to standard courses offered to registered Stanford students and will comprise downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts. And get this: all the courses' materials are being released under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license."

An anonymous reader writes "A site called LegalTorrents has just launched that hosts trackers and seeds for digital media licensed under the Creative Commons license. ('We distribute content with the full permission of the rights holders and use the peer-2-peer file-sharing technology called Bittorrent.') The site even provides a way to donate money to artists you like. (LegalTorrents takes 15% off the top unless you are a member, which costs $50 one-time during the beta period.)" It's always good to see "legitimate" content distributed in ways that make it hard to demonize the distribution system itself — something Lawrence Lessig in particular has been doing for years, and his book "Free Culture" is one of the audiobooks available through LegalTorrents. Note that LegalTorrents has been around for a while now, rather than "just launched," but the current beta period won't last forever.

Dekortage writes "Although it's been up for a few weeks, today is the official launch of FontStruct, a web-based font creation tool. That's right: in your web browser, you can build your own typeface, and download it as a TrueType font. The site's user agreement requires you to release your creations online under one of the Creative Commons licenses. The typefaces tend to be a little blocky, but it's still impressive (and a great way to pass time)."

bcrowell writes "The NYTimes has an editorial plugging Flat World Knowledge, a startup that will offer college textbooks inexpensively (~$30) in print, and free as PDFs. They plan to make their profits from add-ons like podcast study guides and mobile phone flashcards. Books will be licensed under CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike. Mashups and customizations are encouraged, but the NC license is incompatible with strong copyleft licenses such as the GFDL used by Wikipedia. Other companies trying to find a workable business model for free textbooks include Ink Textbooks (revenue from online homework) and Freeload Press (revenue from ads inside the books). So far, none of these companies seems to have succeeded in building up much of a catalog of books; it seems more common for authors of free textbooks to take a DIY approach, putting PDFs on their own web pages, and sometimes arranging on-demand printing with vanity-press publishers like lulu.com. Lots and lots of web sites exist to help people find free textbooks, and CalPIRG has an active campaign pushing for affordable textbooks."

gnujoshua writes "In his blog, SJ Klein, director of community content for OLPC, notes a collaboration among Creative Commons, One Laptop per Child, and TextbookRevolution.org. They are compiling together free and CC-licensed works — and they are asking for people to help them by submitting links to free books, movies, and music. Creative Commons will be burning a LiveDVD to be distributed at South by Southwest; OLPC will be making bundles of books to send all over the world; and Textbook Revolution will be compiling a list of good and free college-level textbooks for the relaunch of their site."

crush writes "The Linux Game Tome notes that the final team to produce a fully Open Source 3D game using the CrystalSpace engine and Blender has been chosen. The project (known as Apricot) aims to produce a cross-platform, 3D game with completely Free (CCA) graphics, music and code. An important side-effect of the project is to improve open source tools for the professional game development industry."
I look forward to more 3D games on my desktop, even if this one won't be the first. (And where is the open-source bus-driving counterpart to the under-rated FlightGear?)

E1ven writes "Creative Commons has this week released their CC+ protocol, which provides a way for authors to allow other people to commercially reuse their work, and give them a pre-negotiated fee or percentage. It makes it easy for people to release the Material under CC-No-Commercial, and then have a way to charge for commercial use if companies are interested."

sla291 writes "Jimmy Wales made an announcement yesterday night at a Wikipedia party in San Francisco : Creative Commons, Wikimedia and the FSF just agreed to make the current Wikipedia license compatible with Creative Commons (CC BY-SA). As Jimbo puts it, 'This is the party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia'."

Thilo2 writes "As most of you probably know, id software released the Quake3 engine in summer 2005 under the terms of the GPL, nearly two years ago. Ever wonder what came out of it? Even though the engine is eight years old, just recently two independent projects have released fully featured multiplayers games, weighing in with downloads of about 550 megabytes each. Urban Terror and World of Padman, formerly modifications that required you to have the original Quake III Arena game, can now be played independently as stand-alone versions. Urban Terror combines realistic environments and weaponry with movement similar to Quake3. World of Padman on the other hand is a colorful shooter in comic style giving you fun weapons like water balloons and water pistols to shoot with. Last but not least there is Tremulous, a first person shooter with added real time strategy elements which has been out for quite some time now. Interesting to note, its game data is licensed under a CC license. All three games use an improved Quake3 engine from ioquake3, which has cleaned up the Quake3 source code since its release and made many improvements like OpenAL, Vorbis and SDL support, and thus are available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX. If you are willing to compile the engine yourself you can get support for even more platforms like Solaris or *BSD."

An anonymous reader writes "Creative Commons announced the release of its licenses on Friday 23 Feb 2007. Changes include "Clarifications Negotiated With Debian and MIT", CC-BY-SA "compatibility structure", endorsement control, etc."

An anonymous reader writes "Creative Commons announced the release of its licenses on Friday 23 Feb 2007. Changes include "Clarifications Negotiated With Debian and MIT", CC-BY-SA "compatibility structure", endorsement control, etc."

Ctrl+Alt+De1337 writes "Creative Commons has announced the release of an add-in to Microsoft Office that allows the easy addition of a CC license to files created with Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. It was co-developed by Microsoft and Creative Commons and only works in Office XP and Office 2003. It can be downloaded from Microsoft's download center after a validation check, and CNet has a screenshot available of the tool."

A reader writes:"The Official Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu 6.06 Desktop Guides, the Official Ubuntu Server 6.06 Guide and the Official Ubuntu Packaging Guide are all now available in print from on-line publisher Lulu. The best part? All of these guide are cheap, in fact the only cost is that of manufacture and shipping, both Canonical and Lulu do not make any profit on the books at all. The Official Ubuntu Desktop Guide for example only costs $6.49 plus postage and contains 98 pages in total. Free downloadable PDF files are available for download on the Ubuntu Documentation Project Lulu website as well as on-line copies at http://help.ubuntu.com. All of the guides are available in many different languages thanks to the Ubuntu Translation Teams. Currently there are about 10 different languages available, more translations will be added to the store as they are compleated in Canonical's on-line project management web site Launchpad. All the guides are dual licenced under the GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licences. This is a really good idea to give Linux users cheap and reliable printed Linux manuals. Lets hope other distributions follow Ubuntu's lead on this one, some of the Gentoo manuals for example available in print this cheap would be really great to see."

minitrue writes "Pearl Jam released their first music video in quite a while under a Creative Commons license allowing anyone to "legally copy, distribute and share the clip" for noncommercial purposes. Creative Commons thinks this may be the first video produced by a major label ever to be CC-licensed. So although the file is only available as a free download via Google Video through May 24, fans can continue sharing it online themselves in perpetuity."

Nochiel writes "What is open source and why should businesses care? Why is innovation important and why isn't our company innovative? Why does it seem like everyone else is innovating while we aren't? How can we leverage Open Source? How can we implement an Open Source business strategy?" Read on for Nochiel's review. Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Stratgy author Ron Goldman and Richard P. Gabriel pages 377 publisher Morgan Kaufmann Publishers rating 8 reviewer Nicholas Ochiel ISBN 1558608893 summary How to introduce open source into the enterprise as a viable and valuable business strategy.

This is a book about open source in the enterprise. It seeks to answer those questions and more. Finally, the Open Source Process has been codified in a manner that gives management the business perspective they have been yearning for.

Too often, Open Source come across as a religion. Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel, through their sober treatment of the topic, successfully detail all the pragmatic aspects that a business should consider.

This book, to paraphrase the authors: ..is for anyone interested in a better understanding of open source--its larger history, its philosophy--, and its future prospects.

It is licensed under a Creative Commons License and is available at this link.

Chapter 1 presents the problem that the modern enterprise faces, namely: how to ensure high levels of innovation and productivity.

The reader is then introduced to the "innovation happens elsewhere" problem: High productivity requires doing less in order to produce more. This, in turn, necessitates being able to leverage other individuals'/companies' efforts. A company, therefore, has to recognize that there are more innovative forces outside the company than in it. By using these forces, a company can maintain a competitive edge. Open source is then presented as a solution to the problem.

The rest of the chapter opens the readers mind to the "new" new way of doing business., illustrates why open source is a viable business strategy and introduces the most important aspect of open source: community.

Chapter 2 discusses the "innovation happens elsewhere" dilemma in even more depth. The authors have a keen understanding on the power of the Commons and how it can make a difference.

In order to illustrate how the Commons can make a difference, the authors use the history of the Web as an example. They highlight the fact that it was built as a volunteer effort with no central planning and a small set of simple protocols. The growth of the internet then came primarily from volunteer efforts.

In this chapter, the authors successfully illustrate that a modern business can succeed only by leveraging the creativity of the Commons and engaging in conversations with a broad and dynamic set of participants in the given problem space.

Chapter 3 then tackles the most important question that managers ask: What is Open Source?

This chapter details the philosophical tenets of open source, the root of the zealotism as well as the history of open source. Many readers will find it interesting that, in the past, open source was the default methodology for leading software and scientific work!

Common myths and misconceptions are also addressed. The authors also provide an interesting comparison of the open source and agile methodologies showing how open source borrows from the strengths of the latter.

The secret sauce in open source is revealed and the various sections along the open source continuum are discussed. In particular, the authors address the value of gated communities and internal open source, a valuable discussion for those managers who wish to introduce open source into their company slowly or even extract value from only a subsection of the open source value chain.

This chapter is a complete description of the open source phenomena. As such, it can easily stand on it's own if one is looking for a quick primer.

Chapter 4 concerns itself with the business reason for adopting open source, how to develop an open source business strategy and how to create a business model that supports the open source strategy. Sun's NetBeans platform is used as a case study to illustrate the various aspects of an open source business.

This section gives possible reasons why you should open source your product as well as why you should use open source. This chapter is directed at the business strategist who wishes to understand how to implement an open source strategy and measure it's success.

Chapter 5 provides a discussion of the legal aspects of open source. It details the nature of a license, the structure of copyright, patents and types of licenses. It also covers multi-licensing, contributor agreements and licenses for documentation.

Chapter 6 concerns itself with the workings of the open source development process. An open source product is not so different from a proprietary one. It has versions, minor and major releases as well as a typical product life cycle.

The differences, where they do arise, are in the new infrastructure (and management of the same) as well as the additional responsibilities that developers are expected to take as they engage the community.

The authors also discuss joining an open source project. In particular, they emphasize that it is valuable to join an existing project if that project is already targeting the niche/functionality you wish to address with your project. This is important because it generates goodwill within the community.

Finally, open source within the company is discussed with case studies from IBM, HP and Sun.

Chapter 7 makes note of the fact that open source initiatives generally begin with middle management. As a result, middle managers encounter a number of challenges: The need to convince upper level management, get approval, acquire resources and set up the infrastructure.

This chapter provides valuable advice and strategies for individuals in this situation. (I wish I had read this chapter while at my previous employment. It would have saved me a tonne of grief.)

Chapter 8 assumes that the project is up and running. The mailing lists are functional and the public repositories are bursting with bleeding edge code. How, then, do we harvest the innovation that is happening elsewhere and build momentum?

After reading this chapter, the reader understands the value of marketing and community outreach. This is particularly valuable especially because it comes from two prominent members of the Sun community. (Sun, is the king of marketing. Their marketing efforts have made Java a household name and tool.)

Chapter 9 provides a summary of the gotcha's at various stages in the open source journey. At first, this chapter seemed superfluous as it repeats much of what has been said in previous chapters.

Upon review, however, the chapter becomes useful as a reference guide for managers as they tackle the problems that arise during implementation. The section on "recovering from mistakes" is particularly useful because a proprietary closed source company is typically used to hiding it's mistakes from customers and the world at large. The authors emphasize that it is important and valuable to fail in public especially if this failure is accompanied by an effective solution.

In Summary the title of this book is deceptive. I would have been better titled: Professional Open Source: A Manger's Guide. It is a lucid and accurate treatment of the topic.

The authors' concept of the commons is very interesting. It is one composed of things whose basic value is not diminished by making a copy. This, in my mind, is amazing! Does this mean that all projects should be open sourced? After all, software increases in value proportionally to the number of people to whom it's distributed.

The book also manages to dispel the myth of first mover advantage. In fact, first mover products rarely have the required quality to dominate the market. Perhaps this explains why open source products are rapidly eroding the market share of established applications. The proprietary stuff was a first mover relative to open source. It's quality was so bad that open source now presents a mature solution that actually works! (I can't help thinking about Zimbra in that regard)

Perhaps the most important message of the book is that there are smarter people in the world and they don't work for you! To paraphrase the authors:

Regardless of how smart, creative and innovative you believe your organization is, there are more smart, creative and innovative people outside your organization than inside. In addition, the majority of elsewhere doesn't particularly care to make products in your space.

This book should be at the bedside of any manager who is either delving into the open source world, wishes to understand what open source has to offer or seeks to clarify why open source as a business strategy will erode the market share of proprietary companies."

Bram writes ""The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, -not songs-... released under the Creative Commons Sampling+ License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing and browsing these samples." In less that 7 months we've grown to 30,000 users and today we finally reached the first goal of the project: we've collected over 10,000 samples, added by various people around the globe: only a slashdotting would be a suiting birthday cake. If you do visit Freesound, don't forget to have a look at the Geotagged Samples as they are well worth it."