Free Ethos of Argunet?

[Virgil Ierubino]

Hi,

I am a new user of Argunet, which I recently discovered. I am told it
is free and open-source, which is promising. However, is it free like
Wikipedia is free?

That would really interest me. If the developers build Argunet under a
totally free license (i.e. a legally binding license that ensures it
will forever be free to the public, just like the license on
Wikipedia), then I will be thoroughly interested.

I have been looking for a tool that does Wikipedia but for arguments.
Collaborative, online, public and eternally free. I'd love argunet to
be that, because although there are already a few sites out there that
offer this, argunet appears to be the best so far.

So do let me know what kind of free ethos this project has.

[Christian Voigt]

hi,

I dont know why, but it seems as if google has not forwarded your
message to my mailbox. Sorry for answering so late

Its good to hear that there is interest in something like a debate
wikipedia out there. It is exactly what I have been working on the
last few months :)
In the near future, it will be possible to publish online debates on
argunet.org, so that everyone can browse through argument maps with
nothing more than a browser (and a flash plugin). These debates will
be published under a creative commons license.

The publication of a debate will stay optional. If you dont want to
publish your debate under this cc licence, you can still use the
argunet server to collaborate with other people or give a specific
user group access to your debate. However, you wont have the RIA
features of argunet.org. So we hope, this is enough incentive for
people to publish their debates.

The structure will be decentralized: Everyone can start an Argunet-
Server for collaborative argument mapping. These servers communicate
with argunet.org if there are new debates to be published or published
debates which have to be updated or deleted. Through this system we
want to minimize the server load for argunet.org (we are not a
commercial project)

At the moment our priority is the 1.0 version of Argunet. The system
for publishing on argunet.org is already in beta state, so I hope to
launch a first version in the next months

thanks for your interest, if you have any more specific user scenarios
or ideas for the debate wikipedia, let me know

regards,
christian

[Christian Voigt]

one last thing, in case you did not know this: The client and the
server software stand under the GPL (not LGPL!), which guarantees that
it will stay open source and free forever and that all software
derived from it will be open source too.

more info: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html