Clinamen

Citizendium has finally picked a license - they've gone with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This is good news. Until now, Citizendium was in a big holding pattern trying to figure out how it was going to license it's work. Citizendium articles can now be circulated much like Wikipedia articles are.

So, is the Citizendium a "commons." This makes it more difficult to argue that it isn't a commons (I am making this argument in the chapter that I'm currently working on). However, Citizendium is still quite different from Wikipedia - I'm just going to have to articulate those differences very carefully.

Larry Lessig announces an important step for Wikipedia and Creative commons. The Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Free Software Foundation got together to approve the possibility of Wikipedia being relicensed under a Creative Commons license (it's currently licensed under the GNU Free Documenation License). However, it hasn't quite gone through yet:

That is very different from saying that Wikipedia has relicensed under a CC license. The decision whether to take advantage of this freedom granted by the FSF when the FSF grants it will be a decision the Wikipedia community will have to make. We are very hopeful that the community will ratify this move to compatible freedoms. And if they do, we are looking forward to an extraordinary celebration.

This whole thing reminds me that Citizendium still hasn't decided on an intellectual property policy. How do you institute a textual community before deciding the nature of the text?