Planet Gnome and Content Licenses on WGO

["Thilo Pfennig" <tpfennig gmail com>]

I like to talk about the Planet. I think historically Planets habe
been a great idea. At first only very few blogs did exist and then
there where many - It was too difficult to visit them all and even
collecting all feeds was difficult. But was is planet really? What is
noise and what is signal?

I think for most of us blogs of gnomers are an inside view. We like to
be informed about what the people we know or not yet know do. Some
companies do have blogs only in their intranets. But we want that to
be public. But the question is what role the Planet should have for
WGO (www.gnome.org) or NGO (news.gnome.org)?

I think that Planet is rather a thing for developer.gnome.org and that
what we rather need as News is content that is dedicated to the news
aspect. I think developer stuff  should be part of WGO and that
developer news is also interesting for many. But I suggest that we
rather blog about developer blog posts in a blog that is part of the
CMS (and send trackbacks to their blogs) as to simply include all
stuff.

The other problem is: Who onws the content. If GNOME gathers data the
various sources might have different licenses and so none of the news
is under control of GNOME. Instead of this it would be much better if
all news content is published under the same free license so that
everybody would know how he can cite and what else he can do.
Everybody who wants to contribute to the news must agree to the given
license. Otherwise everybody could play his games with WGO.

The license issue should be raised for all content on *.gnome.org. I
think it is possible to have a mix of licenses but the CMS must help
the user to select a license (otherwise there should be a default
one). This would allow us and others to exchange content with
Wikipedia or other documentation projects .Not with OpenOffice.org or
fedoraproject.org though because they choose some kind of minority
licenses: PDL and OPL. Thats why I would rather prefer GFDL or one of
the Creative Commons licenses.


Thilo

--
Blog: http://vinci.wordpress.com
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tpfennig