[Developers] MQL license?

[Stefano Mazzocchi]

Spencer Kelly wrote:
> 
> 
>      Danny Hillis was granted a patent (#7,502,770) on the
>     entire concept of Freebase, so it's reasonable to assume that there
>     are other patents lurking.
> 
> 
> you'd think there would be some dissonance about filing a patent on a 
> system that depends on community goodwill.
> i didn't know about this. what an insult.

The Wikipedia Foundation owns the "wikipedia" trademark and it's 
unlikely to license it to others... and this can be seen as a way to 
'protect' the interests of the community and the protection of the 
social dynamics around the site.

If you contribute to some free software projects, they require you to 
transfer copyright of your work back to the company that owns the entire 
codebase. In the MySQL case, you are in fact working for Oracle for free.

Still, it's cheaper for you to get the patch into the trunk than to 
maintain your own vendor branch forever (which is ultimately why such a 
strategy works).

So, while I'm fully with you that it's tricky and *very* difficult to 
manage the social dynamics around the balance of open and proprietary in 
IP, it is also true that not all IP that is not made available to others 
under open or free licensing terms is automatically toxic for the social 
ecosystem around the site.

The "Metaweb must make money after all" argument *is* toxic, IMHO, and 
it's also pretty lame: the fact that Metaweb must make money, is not 
justification for abuse or any activity that feels like "peeing in the 
pool" (also because, ultimately, self-defeating)

My argument is that Metaweb (like many other legal entities that own IP 
around open/free ecologies of contribution) should be judged by what it 
does with the IP it owns, not just by the fact of owning it.

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi                              Application Catalyst
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.                      stefano at metaweb.com
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