OLPC:Community Portal

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Why does this page exist? It doesn't seem to have a clear purpose or else it is drifted away from its original purpose.

--Aburton 15:32, 12 June 2006 (EDT): I think this page would be a good place to communicate exactly how we want the wiki organized, and the order in which things should be done.

Layout Priorities for OLPC Wiki

Feel free to comment, change or add on to the list of wiki imperatives. Discussion in this matter is essential.

  1. Defining specific page goals (eg, what is the purpose of the community portal?)
  2. Establish how best to go about reaching these page goals
  3. Create a page layout standard
  4. Language management
  5. Condense existing content
  6. Add lots of new articles.

Classroom Edition

Q: Can it be made simpler and faster?

This project is beyond compare and all I can say is God bless Negroponte and his team. A project of this magnitude could only have been conceived by people of God and pure in the heart with love running in their 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 projects 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:Allpages for a start...


A fascinating effort... good on ya! (all)
(dharma -- March 18, 2006) Could the table of contents be a link in the navigation panel on the left?--Valerie@vforteachers.com 17:52, 26 May 2006 (EDT)

Copyright Licence for this wiki.

I had forgetten to put the creative commons license glue in the Local Settings file. It is there now: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. --Walter

The link from the bottom of the page leads to the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode web pages.

I am wondering quite why the project uses that licence, as it seems that it could, in some circumstances, work against the interests of the project. For example, suppose that someone starts a page "The laptop song" and various people, within the wiki, gradually put together a happy, sing-along song which publicises the laptop idea and the good which it can do. The licensing system at present in use for the wiki would mean that someone could record the song for their own profit, whereas if the licensing were different then licence fees could be collected by the project and used to support it.

As the One Laptop per Child project is a non-profit project, would it be a good idea to ask Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ whether they would produce for you a custom licence, which they would host within their webspace and administrative system.

Creative Commons has the following web page with a list of licences.

http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses

If they agreed to produce a custom licence for the One Laptop per Child project it could perhaps be something like their http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/legalcode licence, with the commercial use parts of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode added in solely for use by the One Laptop per Child project and its licensees.

This could be something like the Attribution-NonCommercial-Commercial_only_for_the_One_Laptop_per_Child_project_-ShareAlike 2.5 licence. That would be quite a long title: maybe something shorter could be devised like Attribution-NonCommercial-Commercial_only_for_olpc-ShareAlike 2.5 or whatever.

I made this suggestion in relation to a song, but there are other implications. For example, if someone uploads a font into the wiki, with the intention of it being free for use on the laptop. The present licensing would mean that anyone could market the font commercially with no royalties payable, even for wholly commercial projects nothing to do with the aims of the laptop project.

Also, people are asking if the laptop will be marketed at a premium in the developed world, asking with the idea that the premium could be used to help fund the providing of laptops in the poorer developing countries. In order to do that the One Laptop per Child project needs to be able to license the design so that the premium is payable to the project.

I may have misinterpreted the effect of the licence presently being used. Indeed I hope that I have. Yet have I? Intellectual Property is a very valuable thing and royalties and licensing fees from any commercial exploitation of the intellectual property which people put into the wiki could be a valuable source of income for the project.

I am not a lawyer: I am simply writing down in this wiki some concerns which I have. Maybe I have got it wrong.

William Overington

1039 BST 0939 GMT 27 March 2006


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 situation as it was at 1212 GMT 25 March 2006

(This was formerly entitled The present situation 1212 GMT 25 March 2006. The title is now changed as the licensing information which is displayed for the pages of the wiki has been changed since that time. However, some of the notes produced on 25 March 2006 regarding the copyright status of these wiki pages may well still be relevant to the discussion, so have not been altered.)

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

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!

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.

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.

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

Creative Commons Attribution License

cc-by rather than cc-by-sa would be preferable since it would then be compatible with the Wikimedia projects that mostly use GFDL (Wikinews uses cc-by). I would strongly advise against using cc-by-nc on this, or any, wiki, for all the reasons Erik outlines at "The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License". Angela 23:40, 31 March 2006 (EST)

I agree with Angela in most points. I intend to contribute to this wiki by the current chosen license. Altering the license afterwards would lead to a conflict in the license. It is the stated position of the CC people to make CC-BY-SA compatible to GFDL, so this point from Angela might disappear in the (hopefully near) future. -- Mathias Schindler 04:24, 1 April 2006 (EST)
It might be the stated position of the CC people but it isn't the position of the other side, especially Stallman. I don't expect the two to become compatible any time in the near future. Angela 04:29, 1 April 2006 (EST)
Correct. However, the CC does not need to cooperate with the FSF or RMS to make one of its licenses compatible. One-way-compatibility requires only the will and the comptence of one side. This theoretical construct is more or less irrelevant for this debate here, I just mentioned it. -- Mathias Schindler 11:30, 1 April 2006 (EST)
Thank you for putting that point of view. Quite apart from the general case, what would you advise for the situation of possibly having a wiki page where people could write "The Laptop Song" with a view that someone or some group who so chooses could record it with all royalties going to the One Laptop per Child project. If the page with the lyrics is licensed with cc-by-sa then surely that would open the door to anyone recording the song with no royalties going to the One Laptop per Child project, thereby spoiling the idea: or am I misunderstanding something? William Overington 1826 GMT 1 April 2006
First of all, I am not a lawyer and your local law may or may not give you some rights that others don't. If someone wrote a "Laptop Song" under the cc-by-sa, someone else could perform this. Or could add vocals to it or another part. He could sell this song on a website or on a CD-ROM. However, he/she had to license this song under the cc-by-sa as well. That means that everyone else would be able to use (...and modify, translate, re-record, perform) it, including the OLPC project.
Let's go to a second situation: Red Had releases a CD-ROM that contains some Live-CD with QEMU and all the stuff you need to test the OLPC and its special hardware. If content from this web site (or content that would be later considered to be put on this OLPC) would be under a -nc-License, Red Hat would be forbidden to sell this CD-ROM, even if it was just a fee designed to keep the shipping costs moderate. "Non-Commercial"-clauses are very effective in prohibiting the distribution of free content. (Again, IANAL). -- Mathias Schindler 00:44, 2 April 2006 (EST)
I can strongly recommend OLPC on open source software to everyone. The argument presented there should apply to content as well. -- Mathias Schindler 04:15, 2 April 2006 (EDT)

Software upgrade

You may want to upgrade the site to MediaWiki 1.6. Sj 04:08, 2 May 2006 (EDT)

Thank you for the suggestion. Mako and I did exactly that. Walter 01:36, 5 May 2006 (EDT)
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