CZ:License Essays/Jitse Niesen

This essay outlines my (that is, Jitse Niesen's) position on which licensing Citizendium should adopt. I refer to the essay by Mike Johnson for an overview of the possibilities.

Summary: We should allow commercial use, because this allows for the widest distribution of articles.

My interests

Any difficult choice requires balancing the options and deciding the relative weights of the advantages and disadvantages. These weights depends on your personal interests. So, let me start with outlining my interests.

In the context of Citizendium, I am a writer. I contribute to Citizendium because I am interested in certain subjects and I want to spread my knowledge about them. Furthermore, I am stimulated by discussions with other people with similar interests: I learn new things and discover new ways to view the theories that I already know.

Citizendium should chose the licence that best serves its interests. My interests are not exactly the same as Citizendium's: I am only looking for a good home for the articles I contribute to, and I do not particularly care on whether that is Citizendium or another project. On the other hand, the most important thing for the Citizendium project is that this project will be the best free encyclopaedia. Nevertheless, I think I am a fairly typical contributor, and obviously the contributors are essential to our project.

Allow commercial use?

I think the key decision to be made is whether our licence allows commercial use or not. For me, the choice is very easy. I want that the articles that I contribute to are read as widely as possible. Allowing commercial use leads to further avenues for distributing our articles, for instance by selling its text through bookshops, so we should allow it.

I want people to learn from our articles; that's an important reason why I am contributing to them. Given that I have no problem if others profit intellectually from my work, I do not see why I should have a problem if others profit financially from my work. Nevertheless, I concede that I would not like it if some corporation earns a lot of money because of my work without receiving a share myself. However, this seems impossible because our work will always be freely available, and the main licences under consideration (GFDL or Creative Commons with the Share Alike provision) stipulate that any derivative of our work is licensed under the same conditions.

A number of arguments have been raised against allowing commercial use. Some people are afraid that Wikipedia will copy our articles, but I see that actually as a positive thing, because it allows my work to be spread more widely. I do not think that allowing commercial use would have much effect on our ability to get media (like pictures) or grants. I have seen some grant applications for research projects in which the resulting software was to be released under the GFL, which allows commercial use, and this has never been an issue with the grant-giving body.

There is one situation in which I prefer we do not allow commercial use, and that is if not allowing commercial use would lead to far more contributors. I do not think that is the case from the discussion up to now, but I may be wrong here. For this reason, I am very interested in the results of Larry Sanger's survey of the preferences of contributors.

Other issues

If we decide to allow commercial use, as I am arguing above, then our main options are to use either the GFDL or CC-by-sa licence, or dual-license our work. I do not have a strong opinion on this matter. The CC-by-sa is apparently better suited for a wiki, but the GFDL is still widely used. I would prefer that we release our work under both licences, as this allows the widest distribution; failing that, I would prefer CC-by-sa.

If we decide not to allow commercial use, then the option which is mentioned most often is to use the CC-sa-nc licence. This licence does not clearly define what commercial mean and the Creative Commons mailing lists offer a number of different interpretations, so there seems to be some ambiguity here (legal advise may clear this up). Licences with further restrictions, in particular those which do not allow people outside the project to make changes to our work and create derivative works, are unacceptable to me. One of the ideas behind Citizendium is that we can make a good product by collaboration, and I do not see why we should limit this collaboration to members of our project.

A related point is whether contributors should share copyright with the Citizendium Foundation. I will forgo all legal questions, like whether the foundation can get shared copyright to past contributions, because I do not feel qualified to answer them. If we decide to disallow commercial use, then there should be a possibility to grant another licence which does allow some commercial use to some specific partners, because otherwise we will greatly limit our distribution capabilities. This is only possible if the foundation has (shared) copyright. Hence, I think that if we do not allow commercial use, it is essential that contributors are required to share copyright with the foundation. Perhaps the foundation should give a guarantee to only use this shared copyright for specific purposes (so there are many details here to be filled in and it will be another complicated discussion). Even if we decide to allow commercial use, it would be good if the foundation had shared copyright because it will allow us to change the licence if a new and better licence appears.

Jitse Niesen