Nupedia Open Content License

[Jimmy Wales]

Nupedia Open Content Encyclopedia aims to be a general purpose
encyclopedia, a true multi-national effort to generate a high
quality, unbiased, and *free* Encyclopedia.

I would like to invite people to read and critique the 
Nupedia Open Content License, which you may read at:

http://www.nupedia.com/license.shtml

Our goal is to have a license which meets the spirit and
letter of the Open Source Definition.  We are currently
using a hybrid license of the opencontent.org and dmoz.org
licenses.

As I understand it, many "content" licenses are designed in a non-open
fashion, in that that they discriminate against paper publication.
You can redistribute freely online, but when you go to print, you
have to negotiate a license.  The idea seems to be that authors can
make money from print versions.

Nupedia is envisioned as a resource for everyone in the world.
One of my greatest dreams is to see competitive publishers
distributing the paper encyclopedia to all the nations of the
world for little more than the cost of printing.  I have read 
that something like 1/3 of the population of the world, nearly
2 billion people, do not have access to safe drinking water.
Obviously, they don't have computers, either.  But I want them
to be able to afford a comprehensive high quality encyclopedia.

The only restriction on use and reuse that we seek, and I hope
that this is consistent with Open Source ideals, is that when
people use the content on the web, they are required to provide
a hypertext link back to the original project.  The idea here is
to make the project "viral".  When Altavista or Yahoo or someone
important like that picks up the content to make their own branded
encyclopedia, that's *great*.  We want them to do that, and for
free.  The only thing we ask is that each page derived from our
content carry a linkback to us.

This system has worked very well for the http://www.dmoz.org/
Open Directory Project.  They get a large amount of publicity
and new volunteers from links back from the search engines that
use their data.

I seek any and all input, because I believe that one of the most
important determinants of the success of this project is our
credibility within the open source movement.  Therefore, we want
to proceed in a spirit of openness and dialogue with *everyone*.
This project is for everyone.

--Jimbo