It would be good to have a common logo/banner that people could put on material that is "Free Math". That is, if someone releases a paper or lecture note as Free Math (say GPL), he could put that logo on the front page. In PDF:s, the logo could link to a manifesto page on PM describing why Free Math is important. One advantage of this is that it would be easier to find GPL math content on the web using search engines.
Another thing to think about is creating a html-banner. For example, a small button "Support Free Math" that links to the same manifesto. If we could get enough people to put that onto their homepages, it could have an effect.
As a side effect, all this will generate more visitors to PM, which is good since we need to find more regular contributers.
The term "Free Math" is here aritrary, but I think it is quite good.
I'm concerned about the issue of the fog of copyleft and the issue of license incompatibility in particular. Is GPL, FDL, or CC a "good" license for free math? I'm a little frightened by any answer! PM should be "the home for free math on the internet" in my opinion - maybe inclusion on PM, or a link to PM, should be a sufficient "logo"? Doing things this way means that we get to define "free math" however we feel is most convenient for us, rather than having a bunch of people create their own ad hoc definitions. On PM, we can reasonably expect community feedback and certification; out in the wild, people could stick the logo on anything and call it "free". --jcorneli
Not necessarily — one could twist the law the same way that one twists it to make free licenses. The logo would be eligible for legal protection. Planet Math Ltd. would own the rights to the logo and would only allow its use under a "Free Math Logo License" which would specify that this logo can only be affixed to documents and webpages which satisfy whatever definition of "free math" we feel is most convenient (which would be spelled out in the license). To allow for changing circumstances, this license could contain a provision like the one found in the GNU licenses which would allow us to release new versions of the license. Then wild people out there who stick the logo on anything and call it "free" according to their own ad hoc definitions might just wake up one morning and find "cease and desist" letters from Planet Math Ltd. in their mailboxes and be forced (by a judge, if necessary) to either remove the logo or else modify the document to make it conform to the definition of "free math" spelled out in the license.
As I understand it, this would not be all that different from how "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" and "Underwriter's Laboratory" work — one can't stick these organization's logos on one's product without the approval of the organizations who own the rights to the logo. Have a look at these references for ideas.
--rspuzio
These are good points, and just because free math has a home at PM doesn't mean that it can't move around to other parts of the internet too. But still, I'm concerned about how we would define it. I think we should reflect on your essay (I'll need some time to think about it) and reconvene.
--jcorneli Thu Jul 07 14:56:56 2005 UTC
I make a motion that the first item on the agenda when we reconvene be to update What is Free Math in light of what we now know. --rspuzio 7 July 2005
(Reply to Joe's first comment.) Currently it seems that with both PM and Wikipedia under the FDL, it is becoming the de facto "free license" for math on the net. Thus I think the FDL would be a suitable license for "Free Math" — from a purely practical point of view. If everything is under the FDL, it will make exchanging material easier. At this point, however, I think a first step could be to raise awareness of the problems with copyrighted work in science and math in particular. This could be done with a "Support Free Math" button that people can put on their homepages to show support for Free Math. To do this, we do not really need to define whether Free Math is CC, PD, or FDL. However, it would be nice to have a page with Recommendations for the averate user on what he/she can do to support Free Math. That would probably involve some choise of license. – matte 7 July 2005
Wikipedia is migrating away from FDL (they are working with Stallman directly to have the next FDL be compatible with more liberal creative commons licensing). We might want to wait until this happens. Dan Mayer of Wikimedia will be present at the Emory FCDL conference, as will many AsteroidMeta users, so they can speak to him directly. --akrowne Fri Jul 8 21:32:49 UTC 2005