OLPC:Community Portal

This project is beyond compare and all I can say is God bless Negropnte and his team. A project of this magnitude could only have been conceived by people of God and pure in the heart with love rnning in there blood. May this never get into the hands of Greedy 3rd world leaders and civil servants who may again treat it like they have ALL other Aid project that never trickled down yet swelled the debt profile of countries like mine. Long may You (OLPC) run! (Chima Okereke - Nigeria March 25, 2006)

Q: Where's the TOC (table of contents) or index of the site? (I can't find my way around...)

A: Try either One Laptop per Child or Special pages: All Pages for a start...

A fascinating effort... good on ya! (all)
(dharma -- March 18, 2006)

Copyright Licence for this wiki.

Who owns the copyright to material posted here?

Are all contributors required to hand over their copyrights to OLPC? This would mean OLPC could commercialise the info and would not have to share it if they didn't want to.

Is it under the GFDL? This is the license used by Wikipedia. If we have the same licence then it is easy to share stuff with them.

We could use the Creative Commons Wiki license (attribution/share alike). This is said to have some advantages over the GFDL. Wikipedia has a page discussing this. [[1]]. Then we couldn't accept Wikipedia contributions.

What is the OLPC policy on Intellectual Property? This needs to get sorted before we have a bunch of stuff here we can't use because we didn't get permission from the contributors. Once decided we lock the project in to that license forever because of the difficulty of getting permission from previous contributors for changed conditions. (contributed by Filceolaire 13:58, 25 March 2006 (EST) before I got a login)

The present situation 1212 GMT 25 March 2006

When editing this page it has at the bottom of the editing page.

quote

Please note that all contributions to OLPCWiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then don't submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Project:Copyrights for details). DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!

end quote

The item Project:Copyrights is as active link to http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=OLPCWiki:Copyrights&action=edit

That page is empty as such and has the following message surrounding it.

quote

You've followed a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. To create the page, start typing in the box below (see the help page for more info). If you are here by mistake, just click your browser's back button.

end quote

The help page is an active link to http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=OLPCWiki:Help&action=edit yet that page is at present empty as well, surrounded by the same message.

My own view is that if someone wishes to contribute their own work and is prepared for it to be "edited, altered, or removed by other contributors" then that is one thing, requiring assignment of copyright would be quite another. For example, I make fonts. For many of them I would be quite happy to upload a copy into this wiki and for it to be distributed with the laptop and people use it. I am quite happy, in the interests of the potential for good that the laptop project can achieve, to allow that any such copy of one of my fonts uploaded here be "edited, altered, or removed by other contributors" as that may allow things like rarer accented characters to be added and so on though I accept that other editing and alteration could ruin a good font. However, I would be unwilling to assign copyright in a font just because I uploaded a copy here. Free licence, yes, assign copyright, no. This is simply because by assigning copyright one no longer has any rights to use one's own work. Assigning copyright and receiving a free licence back (as some "publish on demand" facilities require) is not good enough for me. I would want to be able, if I so wish, to later produce, say, a book of fonts with an accompanying CD of font files and if I, say, went to a commercial publisher and was asked who owns the rights to my fonts I feel that I would not want to say that the copyright had been assigned but that I had a free licence.

The above example is in the context of fonts, which is one of my particular interests. It could well apply to all sorts of other things.

I feel that the key thing is that just because something is supplied free for use in the wiki or the laptop project that that does not mean that it is necessarily intended by the contributor for it to be used exclusively in the wiki or the laptop project. If this were the font context of the example, if that were the case (and there is no suggestion that it is the intention that it is to be the case) then I would perhaps try to make one font specially for the project under those conditions, thus the project not having what it otherwise would have had.

The issue of copyright and intellectual property is an important one. It is a matter of producing a system which allows the laptop project to gather in lots of items to within its own "editable open source" way of working environment without producing a "reflected-back wave of problems" for contributors of those items if they wish to use other copies elsewhere.

William Overington

25 March 2006