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A Critique of the EFF's Open Audio License
In fact, let me make a brief response to Glass' points as he makes them in the critique -
OAL gives away too much: No response to this. It's for the artist to decide.
No credit to performer: Silly criticism. An intended aim of the license. The performer is free to seek an alternate license from the author if he/she wants to profit off of the song.
Potential damage to reputation: Silly criticism. An intended aim of the license. Like the GPL, this license assumes that free and open should be free and open to everyone for every purpose, even those you find distasteful. "Oh my god, someone is using my GPL'ed program called grep to search for abortion providers in the phone book!"
Viral nature: Silly criticism. An intended aim of the license. Again, if you want to incorporate chunks of someone else's work in your own, you are free to a) be infected by the OAL, or b) seek a different license from the author. Free with restrictions, or, presumably, pay the author for a different deal. Without this license, only b) is available. The OAL only ever provides a possible alternative for people wanting to use a work.
ASCAP and BMI don't enforce the OAL: This is an issue to take up with ASCAP or BMI.
Irrevocable: Silly criticism. Even without this clause, you couldn't "take back" the license, at least for people who've already made use of your work - they took advantage of the license at the time.
Most of the rest of Glass' criticisms are general criticisms of any Free license - it gives away the rights of the author. Well, duh, that's what it's supposed to do. These are criticisms of the aim of the license rather than flaws in the license. What Glass is lacking here is a general BSD-type license for music to compare this against...
Most people don't take him seriously.
And yet here you are, posting for the first time in over half a month (save for replying to two posts which refer to you by name in their subject lines). Feel free to tell me otherwise, but I'd say it looks an awful lot like you do take him seriously, enough to try to marginalize him as a selfish kook. Think nobody was taking him seriously when he was cleaning your clock in the Silicon Valley roundtable?
You seem to be distorting his views, and by extension, people who dislike the GPL license by acting like they want to take everything private, commercialize it, and not return anything. Actually, it's about freedom and being able to do whatever you want with the code, while the GPL tells me, "Better get a second job, because no matter how much time and money you spend improving this code, as soon as you release it, people are going to download the code for free rather than pay you a nickel." The corpses of the Linux companies, the all-time low stock prices of the remaining ones, the decision by the owners of this very web site to start selling proprietary software, the fact that GPL software is always left chasing the taillights of others in the industry, they all bear this out.
I'm sure some people will think that "second job" comment I made above was a snide little slam, but if you read the Silicon Valley roundtable, then you'll know what I was talking about. A programmer asked how someone like him would make a living (i.e., not have to take on a second job) in a GPL world, and Bruce told him that he should start thinking about getting into the support or documentation business. Yeah, I'm sure the programmers of the world are looking forward to that...
I bet she would freak out when some bearded weirdo starts chasing her screaming "It's GNU/OhBabyIWantYou!", "It's GNU/OhBabyIWantYou!"
>Bruce's ad hominem attacks above are uncalled-for. He does nothing to
>attack the substance of my arguments, but merely attempts to attack me
>personally.
>
> --Brett Glass
>
That's because you are an idiot, Brett.