I recently had a realisation as to why the NC licenses promoted by CreativeCommons exist: it comes down to how I'd happily contribute to communities where I feel vested, but only rarely do I feel vested in communities where money is flowing around (particularly if I'm a volunteer). The noncommercial licenses CC provides are meant to contribute to communities in that same spirit. I remain an IP-Abolitionist (and a supporter (roughly speaking) of the GPL as a stopgap measure until we can change the laws), but I better understand where the NC-license-boosters are coming from now.
I've been thinking about what kind of lightweight, no-install-or-easy-install system we could design to provide distributed wikilike functionality. I suppose one way would be for some company (Google? Yahoo?) to offer to host personal wikis for the world; I'd say there are privacy concerns, but then I remember that I already have a (secondary) email account on GMail. What's so important about wikis?
- Data are in a user-comprehensible, simple format (contrast to TeX)
- Linking between documents (pages) is simple
- The format is extensible
- It's a nice, no-nonsense way to organise information, with inner links having properties suitable for exploration
