"Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmfulhttp://www.meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

;)

/Alterego

On 9/12/05, Erik Moeller [email protected] wrote:

For quite a long time, I've been meaning to write a summary of the key reasons not to use "non-commercial uses only" licenses. It is now online at:

http://intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC

I posted it to Kuro5hin as well, where it is now being discussed:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/11/16331/0655

The version on the wiki is slightly more comprehensive and will hopefully evolve over time.

This is not specific to Wikimedia, but I hope that those Wikimedians lobbying individuals, governments, and educational or scientific institutions to put their content under truly free licenses or into the public domain will find this collection of arguments useful.

Best,

Erik _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

Erik Moeller wrote:

For quite a long time, I've been meaning to write a summary of the key reasons not to use "non-commercial uses only" licenses. It is now online at:

http://intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC

I posted it to Kuro5hin as well, where it is now being discussed:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/11/16331/0655

The version on the wiki is slightly more comprehensive and will hopefully evolve over time.

This essay is brilliant and should be read widely. I think it will be worthwhile to go through the list of counter-arguments in the Kuro5shin discussion and make sure all of them are well answered in the wiki version. The arguments are not insane, but they are (in most cases) mistaken.

--Jimbo