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Statement from the board of the Codidact Foundation on commercial partnerships
Our articles of incorporation state the following objectives for our foundation:
The objects of the Company are to carry on activities which benefit the community of people throughout the world who use virtual means to share and develop knowledge and understanding and in particular (without limitation) to
i) provide, maintain and enhance free, open-source web platforms which facilitate communities of people sharing knowledge and exchanging and developing ideas in a spirit of commons, and
ii) provide good governance of a community or communities using one or more such platforms.
We're incorporated as a Community Interest Company, a non-profit that is legally required to serve community interests. This has always been our intention; we formalized it in documents such as the articles of incorporation quoted above to protect everyone.
Companies such as OpenAI and Google are forming partnerships with some organizations that host user-contributed content, for use of that content in for-profit ventures such as building Large Language Models. We share the concerns we have heard from our community about how these companies will use such content. We do not see how such a partnership could benefit our users, and we prioritize the needs of our users and the online community in general.
If in the future we were to receive a proposal that we feel could benefit the community, we commit to discussing it openly and transparently with our users before proceeding. We have not received any proposals of this type so far.
As publishers of online content we cannot prevent anyone from taking it, either in compliance with the licenses or in violation of them. Not all web crawlers are bad (we want to be listed by search engines, for example). We will try to block crawlers of known bad actors. As we are not the copyright holders of content published on our sites, we are unable to take legal action ourselves for license violations; such claims must be pursued by the authors themselves. We will comply with all lawful requests for information to this end insofar as we are able.
By unanimous vote, this is an official statement of the board of directors.
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