Yes, which is why the GFDL is a goddamn pain for magazines or newspapers. Books (the GFDL was designed for books - just include the license text as an appendix) and websites are easy (Wikipedia links to the license on every page), everything else sucks. And audio versions of GFDL text are almost impossible under the license (legal exceptions for the blind are very limited and not enough to make it proper free content).
That's why the Wikimedia Foundation is working with the FSF and Creative Commons to make the GFDL and CC-by-sa compatible - the GFDL requires the entire license text to be present, CC-by-sa allows just a reference to the license.
I was doing a TV piece for Wikipedia (I'm a volunteer media contact in the UK - if you call Wikimedia in the UK, my personal mobile phone rings) in Borders in Oxford Circus. They looked for the encyclopedias. Guess what? There weren't any. At all. They eventually did the shot with me in front of the dictionaries. (The Oxford Dictionary was composed by a Victorian analogue of a wiki - lots and lots of contributors sending in definitions, and anyone could contribute.)
"does the copyright still belong to the original author"
It certainly does, just like any (significant, per copyright law) changes you get added to the Linux kernel.
"and can they revoke the right to have their article printed?"
Nope, GFDL release is irrevocable just like GPL release, just like if you wanted all your changes to Linux pulled no-one would be obliged to. Wikipedia is free content, as analogous to free software.
(If someone's making a real fuss about it and it won't be a major PITA, we may remove a contributor's changes. But that's only so as not to be dicks about it, rather than from any obligation to do so.)
Once Java is properly open sourced, I predict an explosion in open source Java apps. At which time the Java system will get optimisations in performance and usability at a furious rate.
Yeah. Huge Jenga stacks of Java code, waiting for you to pull out the wrong stick. A goddamn PITA to administer.
Still, it has the advantage that Java really is that portable - you really can slide a SPARC box out from underneath and put a Red Hat box in its place. (Then porting all the Unixy stuff from Solaris to Red Hat is a twisty maze of passages, all different. After a while you become allergic to bash-isms or ksh-isms in alleged "/bin/sh" scripts. Then there's devs who write a script on their Windows box and ftp it to the Red Hat server with the CR-LF line endings intact, upon which it of course doesn't work...)
They have years of backward compatibility to support, and they support it as assiduously as Microsoft do. In theory, SunOS 4 binaries will Just Work on Solaris 10, and if they don't it's a reportable bug. (In practice, it's usually because the app was doing something bogus or smart-arsed to tweak the system, but anyway.)
Unlike Microsoft, Sun has a much better platform (Unix) to support backward compatibility on. They also have the "whole widget" advantage for backward compatibility and forward development, of course - but e.g. Fujitsu SPARC boxes running Solaris have the same backward compatibility.
I'm a Solaris admin for a living. Their hardware - particularly their x86 boxes - are actually good value for money, well-built, reliable enough. Solaris is robust enough for industrial use and has very good backward compatibility, and Sun's support is not bad at all. (We have a mix of Solaris 10 and RHEL 4. Some Dells running Solaris and some Sun boxes running RHEL 4.) Red Hat on Dell is a serious competitor for a new Oracle or Java platform, so Sun have to compete properly, and they do okay.
In theory, they possibly could. In practice, Wikipedia would probably express great sorrow over this move (and not let them use the trademark ever again) and the publisher would be buried in poop. I don't think there's much of a threat in any practical sense.
I think the real problem is the GFDL is a horrible license for what Wikipedia does and should be taken out and shot as absolutely soon as possible. (How about audio versions of GFDL text? Does every five-minute snippet need a ten-minute reading of the license? The GFDL discriminates against the blind.) Which we're also working on.
(Even the FSF hasn't a clue about the GFDL. Try emailing licensing@fsf.org with a query on the GFDL. Really, any query at all. They will answer three months later with "Read the text of the license and consult your lawyer." Our lawyer is Mike Godwin and it makes his head hurt.)
It spreads knowledge, and that is after all what WMF and WM.de are all about. That someone else does the commercial heavy lifting of printing and distribution is just fine by us too. "Free content" means "please, use our stuff!"
"Bertelsmann is to publish a single-volume book of the German Wikipedia, in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland. 20 euros a copy, 1 euro from each copy to go to Wikimedia. They're taking the intro section from 25-50,000 articles for the 1000-page book, to be released in September. Who says open source writing can't work?"
There's a sort of Wikipedia house style on the English Wikipedia too, and it's really not very good writing either. Good writers are, unfortunately, much rarer than good researchers or fact checkers.
Urgh. If they do this I swear I will start tracking them down and killing them personally. Except that would probably only cause two to grow from each one I cut in half. Dammit.
Those stats are in fact absolutely accurate down to the page view. They're worked out from the Squid logs, once we worked out a way to log literally every page request without crippling the system. (The old wikistats system sampled 1:1000.)
"While being proud of one's gay acquaintances isn't necessarily a negative characteristic, Wikipedia is not the place to publicly announce a friend's sexual orientation or proclivities. Note that there are almost no vandalism instances that say, "I AM VERY GAY" or "I, Anita Flugelhorn, appreciate a good roll in the hay every once in a while with another woman." It can be inferred that gays and lesbians are exceptionally good Wikipedia contributors, and only some of their very proud but misguided acquaintances feel the need to broadcast their friends' sexual orientation."
(Everyone knows Wikipedia is run by a gay cabal. It's actually a requirement before you're allowed onto the Wikipedia IRC channels.)
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Yes, which is why the GFDL is a goddamn pain for magazines or newspapers. Books (the GFDL was designed for books - just include the license text as an appendix) and websites are easy (Wikipedia links to the license on every page), everything else sucks. And audio versions of GFDL text are almost impossible under the license (legal exceptions for the blind are very limited and not enough to make it proper free content).
That's why the Wikimedia Foundation is working with the FSF and Creative Commons to make the GFDL and CC-by-sa compatible - the GFDL requires the entire license text to be present, CC-by-sa allows just a reference to the license.
I was doing a TV piece for Wikipedia (I'm a volunteer media contact in the UK - if you call Wikimedia in the UK, my personal mobile phone rings) in Borders in Oxford Circus. They looked for the encyclopedias. Guess what? There weren't any. At all. They eventually did the shot with me in front of the dictionaries. (The Oxford Dictionary was composed by a Victorian analogue of a wiki - lots and lots of contributors sending in definitions, and anyone could contribute.)
"does the copyright still belong to the original author"
It certainly does, just like any (significant, per copyright law) changes you get added to the Linux kernel.
"and can they revoke the right to have their article printed?"
Nope, GFDL release is irrevocable just like GPL release, just like if you wanted all your changes to Linux pulled no-one would be obliged to. Wikipedia is free content, as analogous to free software.
(If someone's making a real fuss about it and it won't be a major PITA, we may remove a contributor's changes. But that's only so as not to be dicks about it, rather than from any obligation to do so.)
Yeah. It was the Java on FreeBSD experience that really bludgeoned home that Stallman was right. Again.
40 excellent developers can outdo 1500 mediocre developers in any language, though.
Once Java is properly open sourced, I predict an explosion in open source Java apps. At which time the Java system will get optimisations in performance and usability at a furious rate.
Oh Ghod. You're right. Sun actually invented something worse than COBOL.
Yeah. Huge Jenga stacks of Java code, waiting for you to pull out the wrong stick. A goddamn PITA to administer.
Still, it has the advantage that Java really is that portable - you really can slide a SPARC box out from underneath and put a Red Hat box in its place. (Then porting all the Unixy stuff from Solaris to Red Hat is a twisty maze of passages, all different. After a while you become allergic to bash-isms or ksh-isms in alleged "/bin/sh" scripts. Then there's devs who write a script on their Windows box and ftp it to the Red Hat server with the CR-LF line endings intact, upon which it of course doesn't work ...)
They have years of backward compatibility to support, and they support it as assiduously as Microsoft do. In theory, SunOS 4 binaries will Just Work on Solaris 10, and if they don't it's a reportable bug. (In practice, it's usually because the app was doing something bogus or smart-arsed to tweak the system, but anyway.)
Unlike Microsoft, Sun has a much better platform (Unix) to support backward compatibility on. They also have the "whole widget" advantage for backward compatibility and forward development, of course - but e.g. Fujitsu SPARC boxes running Solaris have the same backward compatibility.
I'm a Solaris admin for a living. Their hardware - particularly their x86 boxes - are actually good value for money, well-built, reliable enough. Solaris is robust enough for industrial use and has very good backward compatibility, and Sun's support is not bad at all. (We have a mix of Solaris 10 and RHEL 4. Some Dells running Solaris and some Sun boxes running RHEL 4.) Red Hat on Dell is a serious competitor for a new Oracle or Java platform, so Sun have to compete properly, and they do okay.
In theory, they possibly could. In practice, Wikipedia would probably express great sorrow over this move (and not let them use the trademark ever again) and the publisher would be buried in poop. I don't think there's much of a threat in any practical sense.
I think the real problem is the GFDL is a horrible license for what Wikipedia does and should be taken out and shot as absolutely soon as possible. (How about audio versions of GFDL text? Does every five-minute snippet need a ten-minute reading of the license? The GFDL discriminates against the blind.) Which we're also working on.
(Even the FSF hasn't a clue about the GFDL. Try emailing licensing@fsf.org with a query on the GFDL. Really, any query at all. They will answer three months later with "Read the text of the license and consult your lawyer." Our lawyer is Mike Godwin and it makes his head hurt.)
German Wikipedia is much more stringent about photos than English Wikipedia. No "fair use" pictures allowed at all.
That would be under GFDL too, as a derived work.
Even then it's still GFDL.
It spreads knowledge, and that is after all what WMF and WM.de are all about. That someone else does the commercial heavy lifting of printing and distribution is just fine by us too. "Free content" means "please, use our stuff!"
This is:
"Bertelsmann is to publish a single-volume book of the German Wikipedia, in cooperation with Wikimedia Deutschland. 20 euros a copy, 1 euro from each copy to go to Wikimedia. They're taking the intro section from 25-50,000 articles for the 1000-page book, to be released in September. Who says open source writing can't work?"
Thank you :-)
There's a sort of Wikipedia house style on the English Wikipedia too, and it's really not very good writing either. Good writers are, unfortunately, much rarer than good researchers or fact checkers.
Urgh. If they do this I swear I will start tracking them down and killing them personally. Except that would probably only cause two to grow from each one I cut in half. Dammit.
Yep. And there's a editor-reviewed DVD derived from English Wikipedia that you are encouraged to download and spread far and wide.
What's written there is not the article text I submitted.
Those stats are in fact absolutely accurate down to the page view. They're worked out from the Squid logs, once we worked out a way to log literally every page request without crippling the system. (The old wikistats system sampled 1:1000.)
It's a thousand-page book. $30 cover price is cheap.
But friends of gays are not allowed to edit articles!
"While being proud of one's gay acquaintances isn't necessarily a negative characteristic, Wikipedia is not the place to publicly announce a friend's sexual orientation or proclivities. Note that there are almost no vandalism instances that say, "I AM VERY GAY" or "I, Anita Flugelhorn, appreciate a good roll in the hay every once in a while with another woman." It can be inferred that gays and lesbians are exceptionally good Wikipedia contributors, and only some of their very proud but misguided acquaintances feel the need to broadcast their friends' sexual orientation."
(Everyone knows Wikipedia is run by a gay cabal. It's actually a requirement before you're allowed onto the Wikipedia IRC channels.)
Educational exception. (Of course, I'm citing Wikipedia here.)