Jimmy Wales Interview on Open Licenses

If anyone is interested in open licenses, I interviewed Jimmy Wales this morning on that topic. He was kind enough to agree to speak with me as a part of the course I’m teaching at San Jose State University on the Open Movement and Libraries. And since I am making all of my course materials openly available under a Creative Commons license I thought it would be useful to share this for those interested. I have also interviewed Stephen Downes of the National Research Council in Canada, and Nicole Engard of LibLime, and I have interviews lined up with more incredibly smart people so stay tuned.

Here are the questions I asked Jimmy Wales and here’s the link to the (10 minute) interview:

1. You are a member of the board at Creative Commons which is a worldwide project which straddles the gap between full copyright and the public domain, offering new choices for creators, can you start off by telling us a bit about more about that?
2. How is it that you first became interested in Open licenses?
3. Many people, including the authors of the Open Source Definition, the Free Software Definition and the PLOS’ Open Access Definition insist that commercial uses must be permissible in order for content to be considered free, how do you think this reconciles with Creative Commons’ non-commercial clause?
4. Wikipedia uses copyleft (GFDL) and you are also on the board of Creative Commons, both of which have licenses which demand that derivative works be licensed with the same original license, do you often find incompatibility issues?
5. The Wikia community is also using Open licensing of content, can you tell us a bit about that?
6. Can you tell us a bit about your latest project Wikia Search and how you are using open licensing there?
7. It seems as though you’ve headed initiatives which have contributed or incorporated nearly all of the topics we are covering in our course – open-source software, open access, open education, and open licensing; Why do you think it’s important to promote Open licensing and Open in general?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Interviews, Open Access, Open Source, Philosophy & Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.