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

[Michel Bauwens]

hi patrick,

not all that is legal is ethical,

the crucial issue for me is, if a private outfit creates a for-profit
venture out of a commons produced by others, how does it shares benefits
with the commons and commoners?

I find the copyfarleft proposal of dmytri increasingly relevant for this,
as, though it may restrict the growth of a commons by charging for its use
to for-profits, at the same time allows usage by other commoners,

Michel

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Patrick Anderson <agnucius at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.
> '"
>
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