Dear Mathieu,
Your post demands my response since I was there when CC0 was first
chosen (i.e., in the April meeting). I won't discuss your other claims
here -- the discussions on the Wikidata list are already doing this, and
I agree with Lydia that no shouting is necessary here.
Nevertheless, I must at least testify to what John wrote in his earlier
message (quote included below this email for reference): it was not
Denny's decision to go for CC0, but the outcome of a discussion among
several people who had worked with open data for some time before
Wikidata was born. I have personally supported this choice and still do.
I have never received any money directly or indirectly from Google,
though -- full disclosure -- I got several T-shirts for supervising in
Summer of Code projects.
At no time did Google or any other company take part in our discussions
in the zeroth hour of Wikidata. And why should they? From what I can see
on their web page, Google has no problem with all kinds of different
license terms in the data they display. Also, I can tell you that we
would have reacted in a very allergic way to such attempts, so if any
company had approached us, this would quite likely have backfired. But,
believe it or not, when we started it was all but clear that this would
become a relevant project at all, and no major company even cared to
lobby us. It was still mostly a few hackers getting together in varying
locations in Berlin. There was a lot of fun, optimism, and excitement in
this early phase of Wikidata (well, I guess we are still in this phase).
So please do not start emails with made-up stories around past events
that you have not even been close to (calling something "research" is no
substitute for methodology and rigour). Putting unsourced personal
attacks against community members before all other arguments is a
reckless way of maximising effect, and such rhetoric can damage our
movement beyond this thread or topic. Our main strength is not our
content but our community, and I am glad to see that many have already
responded to you in such a measured and polite way.
Peace,
Markus
On 30.11.2017 09:55, John Erling Blad wrote:
> Licensing was discussed in the start of the project, as in start of
> developing code for the project, and as I recall it the arguments for
> CC0 was valid and sound. That was long before Danny started working for
> Google.
>
> As I recall it was mention during first week of the project (first week
> of april), and the duscussion reemerged during first week of
> development. That must have been week 4 or 5 (first week of may), as the
> delivery of the laptoppen was delayed. I was against CC0 as I expected
> problems with reuse og external data. The arguments for CC0 convinced me.
>
> And yes, Denny argued for CC0 AS did Daniel and I believe Jeroen and
> Jens did too.
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