[p2p-research] publishing wikipedia articles for money, is that a scam?

[Patrick Anderson]

Kasper Souren wrote
> But it's still a fucking rip-off.
> Especially since they can come up with tons of new "books" every day like this.


Michel Bauwens wrote:
> this would be legitimate, given the license,
> but not necessarily ethical,


I partly understand the concerns, but am confused when I generalize
the results ...

For example, is the art of text really so different from the art of code?

In other words, is it unethical or immoral to sell Free Software?

I'm not fully convinced either way.

...

RMS, considered by many to be *excessively* ethical in his goals, was
selling GNU Emacs for $150 per copy back in 1984.


http://GNU.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html says: "the freedom to sell
copies is crucial"

and also:
"'
At this point, people began wanting to use GNU Emacs, which raised the
question of how to distribute it. Of course, I put it on the anonymous
ftp server on the MIT computer that I used. (This computer,
prep.ai.mit.edu, thus became the principal GNU ftp distribution site;
when it was decommissioned a few years later, we transferred the name
to our new ftp server.) But at that time, many of the interested
people were not on the Internet and could not get a copy by ftp. So
the question was, what would I say to them?

I could have said, “Find a friend who is on the net and who will make
a copy for you.” Or I could have done what I did with the original
PDP-10 Emacs: tell them, “Mail me a tape and a SASE, and I will mail
it back with Emacs on it.” But I had no job, and I was looking for
ways to make money from free software. So I announced that I would
mail a tape to whoever wanted one, for a fee of $150. In this way, I
started a free software distribution business, the precursor of the
companies that today distribute entire Linux-based GNU systems.
'"