Public Domain Conference Papers Online.

bwoodard writes "Over the weekend Duke University Law school held a conference on the public domain which included many well known Free Software advocates such as Lawrence Lessig and Eben Moglen. The papers (in PDF) are presented were quite thought provoking and well worth a read." Timothy brought this conference to our attention on scary halloween.

Comments

Is this the right way for open source ?

[Krapangor]

The main idea behind open source is that everybody should reuse and contribute to the sources freely. But for this to happen you need licenses everybody can understand. Most programmer ain't laywers, so if the licenses is too complicated everybody is scared away which makes open source useless.
So I wonder if this isn't the wrong way. These academic laywers will create too complicated licenses and legal babble which will scare all programmers away from using open source.
I think this is a big problem with the laywers you have in the US. Everwere they see something they crawl on to many all complicated and to suck money from class action suits. We here in europe are very lucky that we don't have such things. We might have weapon control but we won't have any raving mad laywers to sue our butt off.

Interesting quote

[Walter Bell]

From the Goldman paper:

Few companies who develop free software have proven themselves on Wall Street. The problem is not so much the profitability of free software itself, but rather the profitability of their misguided approach. Free software should be used to supplement a traditional, profitable strategy, rather than as the core strategy of a business.

This made a lot of sense to me. My sister worked at one of the failed Linux dot-coms and from what she described, it seemed like her company (to remain nameless) took the "Free Software first, business strategy second" approach. The only thing left of that company is a bunch of homeless guys and a couple Aeron chairs for sale on ebay. Ouch.

By contrast, one of the companies who had used Linux to their advantage in a profitable way is IBM. They started with a very profitable consulting division, and expanded it through judicious contributions to Linux. Their move to Linux saved them a lot of money in training costs, kept things standardized, and helped provide a united front against the competition (Microsoft, Sun, etc.).

~wally

this cuts to the bone

[rodentia]

There are posts asking what this notice has to do with nerds and their news. I gotta say this is the hottest link I've pulled from /. in months. The material domain of this conference cuts right to the heart of what is important about software libre and the digitisation of cultural activity. The pragmatist coders here will say that its all about efficiency of algorithms, fast debugging, and software development models. Not so. What is at stake is not RIAA profits, closed Windows API's or top-down management models. What is at stake are fundamental assumptions the 20C capitalist West has made about the nature and outcomes of intellectual activity. There is a real revolution in the works and, as is so often the case, those at the forefront don't always realize what they're fighting for or what they are really achieving. I'm not wheezing about the digital future; there are real changes afoot in the way we think, create and work. The papers here begin the work of specifying those changes.