On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Aaron Wolf <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for the thoughts, Mike! > > We have written much more specific rules than I've stated here, but the > finalized policies are yet to be completed (and we're recruiting a steering > committee to be involved in that). I'll send you an invitation to look at > the system in progress. We're working toward opening everything up and just > want to be clear and have more things set before opening publicly. > > Your impression of our proposals is pretty close already. We have a > particular formula and some other details in the full proposal.
I see... > As to Free/Libre/Open, we are being absolute. We want to require projects to > meet all the requirements of things like the Open Definition, and on top of > that to accept the upcoming Defensive Patent License and more. We do not > want to permit ANY NC or ND content! We already list on our proposal all > these requirements, and I fully evaluated the different terms like the Open > Definition. I am also VERY happy to hear you speak up against NC acceptance. > I have been worried about reaching out to the CC community about wasting > time engaging with that issue. At this point, I want to have discussions > with people who are sympathetic to true Free/Open (i.e. no ND NC > restrictions). Great! > As to Snowdrift itself, yes we intend to run as a cooperative. The .coop > domain is regulated like .gov and .edu. We MUST run as a cooperative simply > to have the domain. We also will license everything with AGPL and CC-BY-SA. A triviality, and presumably a true assertion, but "(c)" in the current footer is a bit off-putting. when found on free/open-esque sites is often a signal that publisher doesn't really get free/open. :-/ > Here's the weird thing: I'm worried (perhaps unjustly, please convince me to > drop my worry if you think I should) about opening to the complete public > too early. The irony is: I want to be open and sharing, but I also want some > very strong restrictions, namely restrictions to be Free/Open! My concern is > that if someone likes our funding ideas but doesn't care about Free/Open, > they could set up a rival site (or existing systems with lots of clout could > implement an option to function like us) but without the Free/Open > requirement! This would diminish our unique qualities. I think we need a > strong head-start to have a fully functioning system including our > requirements before anyone has the option of forking our system or ideas. > Ideally, I want to share as openly as possible with everyone who is > sympathetic to Free/Open stuff and block access of those who are anti-Open > or otherwise apathetic about freedom. Your fears of copying are unwarranted. Nobody will care, let alone copy, unless/until your scheme shows some success. Anyone looking to do something new in "crowdfunding" and who looks for previous ideas, or just thinks about it a bit, will come up with lots of potentially-interesting-but-untested schemes. > For now, we implemented a privacy system. But we're going to release the > code on GitHub next week. And we'll open up things more and more. All the > discussion here is helping me improve our clarity, and once we have a larger > team on the project, I'll feel more comfortable going fully public. I just > want a strong momentum. I hope that's understandable. I'm not dogmatic, and > I'm open to being convinced that my fears are unwarranted. Wanting to go out with strong momentum, on the other hand, ought be a concern. If you got lots of publicity right now, it would net nothing, as nearly all who saw would write off as confusing and unrealistic. But I think there's hope, or hopefully I wouldn't bother writing this mail. Speaking of another kind of dogmatism, I'd encourage you to at least mirror your repository on gitorious, which is an open service, unlike github. See http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html for an argument, and https://lists.fedorahosted.org/pipermail/copyleft-next/2012-November/thread.html#278 continuing to https://lists.fedorahosted.org/pipermail/copyleft-next/2012-December/thread.html for examples of arguments people WILL make to you, given that you are targeting those who are not apathetic about freedom. :) Mike _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss
