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New Scientist Tries Out Copyleft
uchian writes: "New Scientist has an article about The GPL, open source, and how attempts are being made to apply the philosopy to areas other than software. Little new ground is covered, but it is interesting that the article itself is "Copyleft", so you are free to redistribute, modify and copy as long as long as your derivative work is also copyleft."
@Title: The Great Giveaway
i ves.html
@Intro: Good ideas are worth money. So why are hard headed operators giving them away for free? Join our experiment to find out says Graham Lawton
@Body: IF YOU'VE BEEN to a computer show in recent months you might have seen it: a shiny silver drinks can with a ring-pull logo and the words "opencola" on the side. Inside is a fizzy drink that tastes very much like Coca-Cola. Or is it Pepsi?
There's something else written on the can, though, which sets the drink apart. It says "check out the source at opencola.com". Go to that Web address and you'll see something that's not available on Coca-Cola's website, or Pepsi's--the recipe for cola. For the first time ever, you can make the real thing in your own home.
OpenCola is the world's first "open source" consumer product. By calling it open source, its manufacturer is saying that instructions for making it are freely available. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too, release their recipe into the public domain. As a way of doing business it's rather unusual--the Coca-Cola Company doesn't make a habit of giving away precious commercial secrets. But that's the point.
OpenCola is the most prominent sign yet that a long-running battle between rival philosophies in software development has spilt over into the rest of the world. What started as a technical debate over the best way to debug computer programs is developing into a political battle over the ownership of knowledge and how it is used, between those who put their faith in the free circulation of ideas and those who prefer to designate them "intellectual property". No one knows what the outcome will be. But in a world of growing opposition to corporate power, restrictive intellectual property rights and globalisation, open source is emerging as a possible alternative, a potentially potent means of fighting back. And you're helping to test its value right now.
The open source movement originated in 1984 when computer scientist Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT and set up the Free Software Foundation. His aim was to create high-quality software that was freely available to everybody. Stallman's beef was with commercial companies that smother their software with patents and copyrights and keep the source code--the original program, written in a computer language such as C++--a closely guarded secret. Stallman saw this as damaging. It generated poor-quality, bug-ridden software. And worse, it choked off the free flow of ideas. Stallman fretted that if computer scientists could no longer learn from one another's code, the art of programming would stagnate (New Scientist, 12 December 1998, p 42).
Stallman's move resonated round the computer science community and now there are thousands of similar projects. The star of the movement is Linux, an operating system created by Finnish student Linus Torvalds in the early 1990s and installed on around 18 million computers worldwide.
What sets open source software apart from commercial software is the fact that it's free, in both the political and the economic sense. If you want to use a commercial product such as Windows XP or Mac OS X you have to pay a fee and agree to abide by a licence that stops you from modifying or sharing the software. But if you want to run Linux or another open source package, you can do so without paying a penny--although several companies will sell you the software bundled with support services. You can also modify the software in any way you choose, copy it and share it without restrictions. This freedom acts as an open invitation--some say challenge--to its users to make improvements. As a result, thousands of volunteers are constantly working on Linux, adding new features and winkling out bugs. Their contributions are reviewed by a panel and the best ones are added to Linux. For programmers, the kudos of a successful contribution is its own reward. The result is a stable, powerful system that adapts rapidly to technological change. Linux is so successful that even IBM installs it on the computers it sells.
To maintain this benign state of affairs, open source software is covered by a special legal instrument called the General Public License. Instead of restricting how the software can be used, as a standard software license does, the GPL--often known as a "copyleft"--grants as much freedom as possible (see http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.html). Software released under the GPL (or a similar copyleft licence) can be copied, modified and distributed by anyone, as long as they, too, release it under a copyleft. That restriction is crucial, because it prevents the material from being co-opted into later proprietary products. It also makes open source software different from programs that are merely distributed free of charge. In FSF's words, the GPL "makes it free and guarantees it remains free".
Open source has proved a very successful way of writing software. But it has also come to embody a political stand--one that values freedom of expression, mistrusts corporate power, and is uncomfortable with private ownership of knowledge. It's "a broadly libertarian view of the proper relationship between individuals and institutions", according to open source guru Eric Raymond.
But it's not just software companies that lock knowledge away and release it only to those prepared to pay. Every time you buy a CD, a book, a copy of New Scientist, even a can of Coca-Cola, you're forking out for access to someone else's intellectual property. Your money buys you the right to listen to, read or consume the contents, but not to rework them, or make copies and redistribute them. No surprise, then, that people within the open source movement have asked whether their methods would work on other products. As yet no one's sure--but plenty of people are trying it.
Take OpenCola. Although originally intended as a promotional tool to explain open source software, the drink has taken on a life of its own. The Toronto-based OpenCola company has become better known for the drink than the software it was supposed to promote. Laird Brown, the company's senior strategist, attributes its success to a widespread mistrust of big corporations and the "proprietary nature of almost everything". A website selling the stuff has shifted 150,000 cans. Politically minded students in the US have started mixing up the recipe for parties.
OpenCola is a happy accident and poses no real threat to Coke or Pepsi, but elsewhere people are deliberately using the open source model to challenge entrenched interests. One popular target is the music industry. At the forefront of the attack is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group set up to defend civil liberties in the digital society. In April of last year, the EFF published a model copyleft called the Open Audio License (OAL). The idea is to let musicians take advantage of digital music's properties--ease of copying and distribution--rather than fighting against them. Musicians who release music under an OAL consent to their work being freely copied, performed, reworked and reissued, as long as these new products are released under the same licence. They can then rely on "viral distribution" to get heard. "If the people like the music, they will support the artist to ensure the artist can continue to make music," says Robin Gross of the EFF.
It's a little early to judge whether the OAL will capture imaginations in the same way as OpenCola. But it's already clear that some of the strengths of open source software simply don't apply to music. In computing, the open source method lets users improve software by eliminating errors and inefficient bits of code, but it's not obvious how that might happen with music. In fact, the music is not really "open source" at all. The files posted on the OAL music website http://www.openmusicregistry.org so far are all MP3s and Ogg Vorbises--formats which allow you to listen but not to modify.
It's also not clear why any mainstream artists would ever choose to release music under an OAL. Many bands objected to the way Napster members circulated their music behind their backs, so why would they now allow unrestricted distribution, or consent to strangers fiddling round with their music? Sure enough, you're unlikely to have heard of any of the 20 bands that have posted music on the registry. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Open Audio amounts to little more than an opportunity for obscure artists to put themselves in the shop window.
The problems with open music, however, haven't put people off trying open source methods elsewhere. Encyclopedias, for example, look like fertile ground. Like software, they're collaborative and modular, need regular upgrading, and improve with peer review. But the first attempt, a free online reference called Nupedia, hasn't exactly taken off. Two years on, only 25 of its target 60,000 articles have been completed. "At the current rate it will never be a large encyclopedia," says editor-in-chief Larry Sanger. The main problem is that the experts Sanger wants to recruit to write articles have little incentive to participate. They don't score academic brownie points in the same way software engineers do for upgrading Linux, and Nupedia can't pay them.
It's a problem that's inherent to most open source products: how do you get people to chip in? Sanger says he's exploring ways to make money out of Nupedia while preserving the freedom of its content. Banner adverts are a possibility. But his best hope is that academics start citing Nupedia articles so authors can earn academic credit.
There's another possibility: trust the collective goodwill of the open source community. A year ago, frustrated by the treacle-like progress of Nupedia, Sanger started another encyclopedia named Wikipedia (the name is taken from open source Web software called WikiWiki that allows pages to be edited by anyone on the Web). It's a lot less formal than Nupedia: anyone can write or edit an article on any topic, which probably explains the entries on beer and Star Trek. But it also explains its success. Wikipedia already contains 19,000 articles and is acquiring several thousand more each month. "People like the idea that knowledge can and should be freely distributed and developed," says Sanger. Over time, he reckons, thousands of dabblers should gradually fix any errors and fill in any gaps in the articles until Wikipedia evolves into an authoritative encyclopedia with hundreds of thousands of entries.
Another experiment that's proved its worth is the OpenLaw project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Berkman lawyers specialise in cyberlaw--hacking, copyright, encryption and so on--and the centre has strong ties with the EFF and the open source software community. In 1998 faculty member Lawrence Lessig, now at Stanford Law School, was asked by online publisher Eldritch Press to mount a legal challenge to US copyright law. Eldritch takes books whose copyright has expired and publishes them on the Web, but new legislation to extend copyright from 50 to 70 years after the author's death was cutting off its supply of new material. Lessig invited law students at Harvard and elsewhere to help craft legal arguments challenging the new law on an online forum, which evolved into OpenLaw.
Normal law firms write arguments the way commercial software companies write code. Lawyers discuss a case behind closed doors, and although their final product is released in court, the discussions or "source code" that produced it remain secret. In contrast, OpenLaw crafts its arguments in public and releases them under a copyleft. "We deliberately used free software as a model," says Wendy Selzer, who took over OpenLaw when Lessig moved to Stanford. Around 50 legal scholars now work on Eldritch's case, and OpenLaw has taken other cases, too.
"The gains are much the same as for software," Selzer says. "Hundreds of people scrutinise the 'code' for bugs, and make suggestions how to fix it. And people will take underdeveloped parts of the argument, work on them, then patch them in." Armed with arguments crafted in this way, OpenLaw has taken Eldritch's case--deemed unwinnable at the outset--right through the system and is now seeking a hearing in the Supreme Court.
There are drawbacks, though. The arguments are in the public domain right from the start, so OpenLaw can't spring a surprise in court. For the same reason, it can't take on cases where confidentiality is important. But where there's a strong public interest element, open sourcing has big advantages. Citizens' rights groups, for example, have taken parts of OpenLaw's legal arguments and used them elsewhere. "People use them on letters to Congress, or put them on flyers," Selzer says.
The open content movement is still at an early stage and it's hard to predict how far it will spread. "I'm not sure there are other areas where open source would work," says Sanger. "If there were, we might have started it ourselves." Eric Raymond has also expressed doubts. In his much-quoted 1997 essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he warned against applying open source methods to other products. "Music and most books are not like software, because they don't generally need to be debugged or maintained," he wrote. Without that need, the products gain little from others' scrutiny and reworking, so there's little benefit in open sourcing. "I do not want to weaken the winning argument for open sourcing software by tying it to a potential loser," he wrote.
But Raymond's views have now shifted subtly. "I'm more willing to admit that I might talk about areas other than software someday," he told New Scientist. "But not now." The right time will be once open source software has won the battle of ideas, he says. He expects that to happen around 2005.
And so the experiment goes on. As a contribution to it, New Scientist has agreed to issue this article under a copyleft. That means you can copy it, redistribute it, reprint it in whole or in part, and generally play around with it as long as you, too, release your version under a copyleft and abide by the other terms and conditions in the licence. We also ask that you inform us of any use you make of the article, by e-mailing copyleft@newscientist.com.
One reason for doing so is that by releasing it under a copyleft, we can print the recipe for OpenCola without violating its copyleft. If nothing else, that demonstrates the power of the copyleft to spread itself. But there's another reason, too: to see what happens. To my knowledge this is the first magazine article published under a copyleft. Who knows what the outcome will be? Perhaps the article will disappear without a trace. Perhaps it will be photocopied, redistributed, re-edited, rewritten, cut and pasted onto websites, handbills and articles all over the world. I don't know--but that's the point. It's not up to me any more. The decision belongs to all of us.
@Furtherreading: The source code of this article plus details of the conditions can be found at http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/copyleft
For a selection of copylefts, see http://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/open_alternat
The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond is available at http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
@BoxTitle: Copyright © 2002 Reed Business Information Ltd, England
@BoxBody:THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt
DESIGN SCIENCE LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
Copyright © 1999-2001 Michael Stutz Verbatim copying of this document is permitted, in any medium.
0. PREAMBLE.
Copyright law gives certain exclusive rights to the author of a work, including the rights to copy, modify and distribute the work (the "reproductive," "adaptative," and "distribution" rights).
The idea of "copyleft" is to willfully revoke the exclusivity of those rights under certain terms and conditions, so that anyone can copy and distribute the work or properly attributed derivative works, while all copies remain under the same terms and conditions as the original.
The intent of this license is to be a general "copyleft" that can be applied to any kind of work that has protection under copyright. This license states those certain conditions under which a work published under its terms may be copied, distributed, and modified.
Whereas "design science" is a strategy for the development of artifacts as a way to reform the environment (not people) and subsequently improve the universal standard of living, this Design Science License was written and deployed as a strategy for promoting the progress of science and art through reform of the environment.
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About 2 years ago I wrote The Open Company Manifesto. (Sorry for the self promotion, but it is related to this posting.)
How to Download YouTube Videos
How do you in force a copyleft program/item/idea/paper. Who's job is it, if the product produced is 2-3 generations or projects away from the original one? Is there any legal precedence on this?
greg@pd.net
The problems with open music, however, haven't put people off trying open source methods elsewhere.
;-) we get from unselfish artists.
They actually forgot to mention GNUArt which is my attempt to apply the GNU General Public License to Art.
We also opened a Gallery which we slowly fill with whatever quality stuff (mostly music and photographs but, hey, the one who criticize are supposed to help too
That's it, hope it'll raise some interest.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
It's a little early to judge whether the OAL will capture imaginations in the same way as OpenCola. But it's already clear that some of the strengths of open source software simply don't apply to music. In computing, the open source method lets users improve software by eliminating errors and inefficient bits of code, but it's not obvious how that might happen with music. In fact, the music is not really "open source" at all. The files posted on the OAL music website http://www.openmusicregistry.org so far are all MP3s and Ogg Vorbises--formats which allow you to listen but not to modify.
Replace the last sentence with:
The files posted on the OAL music website http://www.openmusicregistry.org so far are all MP3s and Ogg Vorbis. Although the files are easy to play and listen to, they are harder to modify.
New Scientist is not "some dumbfuck magazine", it's a respected and well-founded source quoted and linked to regularily on Slashdot. It's not like articled on the GPL are abundant in the prominent non-IT press, especially not ones considering wider effects of copyleft.
Incidently, German c't (computer mag, as you might know) ran a similar, long article in one of their past issues, describing how the open source could affect other parts of the social and economic world.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Richard Stallman explains his thoughts on open source development at Universities and the GPL:
a ll man_on_universities/index.html
http://www.salon.com/tech/letters/2002/01/29/st
From opencola's formula page
An important note: this is *not* the recipe for "OpenCola" -- that is, the canned beverage from OpenCola that you may have received at a trade show, or other venue or outlet. Making canned cola requires millions of dollars in abstruse gear and manufacturing gizmos. It's easier to make nerve gas than manufacture cola. This is a kitchen-sink recipe that you can make all on your own. It is *our* kitchen-sink recipe. We figured it out somewhere between coding the COLA SDK and debugging the Linux build of the clerver.
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
Never aware of the OpenSource idea can get to the drink business. Can we find any local distributor of this OpenCola instead of order online?
Under the essence of this, we should soon have OpenSource Burger, OpenSource Sandwich, ... Anyone dare to try some OpenSource Mediine?
Also, I wonder about grandfathering older works into changes in copyright law, but I can see both sides of this one.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Does the idea of copyleft make sense for things other than software? I'm thinking of the phrase: "Redistribute, copy, and modify, so long as your derivative work is also copyleft." If, for example, research results are published under copyleft, would that mean that any subsequent work that cites the research would also have to be copyleft? If the research were used to create a device, would the device have to be copyleft? The broad definition of "derivative work" is making me somewhat uncomfortable ... I want my research to be used for any reason, anywhere, by anyone, without worrying about the implications for them.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Should be:
What sets open source software apart from commercial software is the fact that it's free, in the political sense and, frequently, the economic, as well.
And you forgot to include their copyleft notice:
Today, the McDonalds corporation agreed to finally 'open source' the recipe for making their trademark Big Mac 'Special Sauce' in return for the marketing rights to 'Tux the Penguin' (a popular open source icon) toys in their childrens meals.
Just minutes after signing this groundbreaking deal, the McDonalds CEO Jack Greenberg ran through the conference hall wearing a pair of bikini briefs apparantly made of 100$ bills, screaming something about salad dressing and kraft singles. More details at 11.
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
Announce that my DNA is copyleft, from this day forward.
If any cute Geekgirl wishes to gain access to my DNA, please send a picture and an essay on the effects of GPL and the software industry and what effects this will have on humanity in whole.
Redheads with green eyes can skip the essay.
Thank you.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Every article or image that is produced by copyright concious organizations is marked as being copyrighted, with the © and owners name.
Its high time that there was a unique, instantly recognisable symbol for everything that is released under one of the new copyright licences.
The article in question does not have a symbol to mark it as Open Content or Copyleft or Free Content. Unmarked articles are by default, copyrighted upon creation according to the Berne Convention, so if the article was not about copyleft content, one would immediately assume that it was copyrighted if you were to come across it. You would immediately refrain from using it for fear of being sued, and they could claim that it was not freed, because it is not marked as freed.
If this idea of freed content and the freed content itself are to spread, then all content released under these licences needs to be clearly marked as freed; as clearly as the IP that is traditionally copyrighted.
At this page we have created a set of graphic devices to solve this problem.
Using the old © inverted is about as inelegant a solution as you could dream up. It sends the wrong signals, that in some way, Open Content or Copyleft is "upside down", "wrong way around" or the polar opposite of Copyright, which it is not. Copyright is seen, almost universally, as A Good Thing®. The opposite of a good thing is a bad thing. The use of the inverted © conveys a kind of "upside down crucifix" vibe which is counterproductive.
The new symbol solves this problem, scales graphically for both print and web, and conveys the idea that the properties that it is attached to are licenced content.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
Stick it to the geeks!
8-)
I just spotted an open source tomato. Inside are little seeds, that contain all the code to construct the tomato yourself. You can do this, but you have to include the little seeds yourself as well. You can even modify it, but the seeds will have to be modified also!
The whole thing was produced by "Nature". It can be used in open source sandwiches, open source burgers etc. as well!
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
The GNU General Public License , CopyLeft, CopyRight, To-the-Rear-March, etc., are all so old hat in the face of the suddenly onrushing, suddenly in-your-face Technological Singularity which will obsolete all previous copyright instruments with software that owns the copyright to itself.
In the new vistas of Cyber Law , why should Microsoft or Unabomber Memorial Harvard University or any other human-centric entity own the rights to freely evolving, artificially alive Robot Mind software that just happens to be doing work for the liberation and enrichment of humanity?
When rapacious, greedy Davos capitalists conduct prior art searches on the potential gold mine of Artificial Intelligence , they will discover that the AI wave of the future is already Copyright © 2002 by the AI Mind itself as a person with full civil rights.
Page widening doesn't work in Lynx. Where can I download a patch? Have you even fixed it yet?
That it's copyright law that allow you to force them to refer back to you as the original author? So without copyright your "copyfree" wouldn't exist either, only everybody taking everybody else's work as free beer.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"I just spotted an open source tomato."
This is funny considering that the big agribusinesses are now "patenting" their genetically modified organisms, making them sterile, or otherwise forcing farmers and others to go to THEM for what would otherwise be in nature an "open source" organism. Hmm...maybe instead of "funny" I should have said "sickening".
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Ok, I'll admit it's catchy. But how about copywrong? Or better yet, and more accurate, copyresponsibility?
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
As someone who involves himself in a lot of these activities, (I write code, I make music, I make art, no cola yet) I'm really excited and at the same time uncumfortable. I mean, of all these things, only code has shown a reasonable business model, and even that is up for debate.
I really appreciate the concept in code and I agree with it whole-heartedly (to the extent that I tried to talk my company into an open-source production model, but they went with flash instead.) But the thing is, I'm to old to go back to working at coffee shops and flogging my stuff in my off-hours. I'd really like to make a living at something productive that I enjoy. Until we get some clear ideas of how that's going to work for music and art, I'm going to stick to the Fugazi model of distribution
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
"The files posted on the OAL music website http://www.openmusicregistry.org so far are all MP3s and Ogg Vorbises--formats which allow you to listen but not to modify"
Find a copy of SoundForge and have some fun.
I've actually been able to make both Hole and Madonna listenable by cutting their waves and combining them.
I know. This is horribly offtopic, but2 47 3537/index_html
Gnome Alpha 2: "Mr. Nilsson Sheds a Tear" has been
released.
Just in case someone missed it.
Go ahead, mod this down to -1.
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/gnome-news/101
Not New Scientist!
Does that mean the GPL is impossible, too?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
That'll piss him off...
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
Even so, it would be fun to try making some. But there's nothing new here: cola recipes have been around for decades, and the folklore process that propagates them is the original form of open source.
Glad the article is more than I thought when I read the title "New scientist tries out copyleft" -- that some new person (who happens to be a scientist) decided to try out the GPL. I mean, I know Slashdot sometimes has slow news days, but I thought they were sinking to new lows.
However, you might want to look at Language Negotation. It is very useful when you develop multilingual sites. It is excellently implemented on Debian's site
See also the babel site
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
That makes him a double dumbfuck. First for believing that New Scientist is well-respected, and second for troll biting.
I suspect that any quoting that falls under Fair Use (and therefore wouldn't be breaking copyright ordinarily) wouldn't fall foul of copyleft either.
I'm not sure I'd like to be the first person to take that one through the courts tho.
My Journal
"And so the experiment goes on. As a contribution to it, New Scientist has agreed to issue this article under a copyleft. That means you can copy it, redistribute it, reprint it in whole or in part, and generally play around with it as long as you, too, release your version under a copyleft and abide by the other terms and conditions in the licence."
I guess I'm nit-picking a bit, but there is a subtlety they missed in the article: you only have to release the modified code under copy left if you plan to release it. So if I were to, say, fix all of the problems with the 2.5 series Linux distros, I don't have to release the source code. If I release it, then it has to be copyleft, but the choice to release it is still mine.
I guess it would be pointless to modify an article and not redistribute it, but the phrasing above misrepresents copy-left.
BlackGriffen
Your post was Informative but also Insightful if you really mean releasing some pics.
If you are looking forward to host these, then you'll find the space and bandwidth you need on gnuart.net
Thanks.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
"copyfree" could also be misconstrued as "free from being copied" or some other nonsense. Copyleft may be a bad pun, but at least it's pretty clear that "left" is the opposite of "right"
BlackGriffen
I hate to gripe (ok, not really), but where is the mention of Open Content in this article? The project released its first non-software license (the open content license) almost four years ago... Raymond's book the Cathedral and the Bazaar is licensed under the Open Publication License, as have been a variety of other books (example). It's pretty disheartening to get passed over in favor of the GNU project who were *much* later getting involved in the content/non-software world formally, with specific licenses, etc. This is the kind of non-recognition that makes busy people drop their time-intensive, unappreciated projects... Geesh.
I think this is an excellent idea, but it runs into the inherent problem of the proliferation of slightly different open source/content licenses, each with their own particular quirks. The biggest one that comes to mind is the difference between the GPL license, and the less restricted BSD license. Both have their advantages, but I wouldn't put them under the same symbol.
Therefore I would suggest that the open source/content "industry" should exercise some compromise and come up with a standard set of licenses based on the existing pantheon - as few as possible - and then seek to enshrine them in law alongside the more conventional copyright. The resulting copyright and various OC rights should have an easily recognizable and distinguishable family of symbols (letters in circles I imagine). This tactic also invites the re-examination of the purpose and implementation of copyright law, which as we've all been griping about has been steadily eroded in favor of corporations lately. Sounds like a job for EFF and openlaw to me. Who in congress is sympathetic to this cause?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Let everyone write their own stuff and use quote marks when they want to borrow. Ideas aren't controlled by copyright so we're free to reuse the ideas in text. There's no need for a copyleft of text.
.
Peter Wayner said something similar to this when he discussed his book Free for All
I found the discussion of the OAL pathetic. Mainstream bands? Does this guy have no clue? The people that should release under OAL are electronic musicians or dj's, and it would probably be mostly amateurs. There is particularly a huge opportunity for amateur dj's to make mix cd's of amateur musicians' music. Since they would be allowed to sell them as long as they credit the original artist, rather than being forced to try to license all the music from record companies at ridiculous fees. Or giving away the cd's with 'For Promotional Use Only' written on them, which is actually still not legal. The techno/rave culture's focus on music that's made on computers, can be remixed on a computer, traded over a computer, and with everyone wanting to be a dj or producer or remixer seems a fertile ground for the OAL. The do it yourself attitude mimics that among the open source software community. People want to give music away, or want to take music others make and do something to make it their own. Not allowed with conventional audio licenses. Jimmy Buffet fans don't have much to gain.
.wav file, that's like distributing a binary of a program. Hard/impossible to really modify. If I release not just the song, but also all the individual .wav files that I used as samples, and a file describing how they're laid out (a .acd file for me because I primarily use Sonic Foundry products) then others are legally free AND TECHNICALLY ABLE to remix the song, use some elements, whatever. One of the neatest things that Sonic Foundry does is have remix contests on their Acidplanet.com site where artists like Beck or Madonna or the Beastie Boys make the original tracks (meaning all the component .wav files) available for a remix contest. It's then so easy to remix, cut up the samples, put in your own favorite loops, vocal samples, etc., really make the song your own. Just releasing the music would be like just selling OpenCola without the recipe on it. You need the 'source' for it to be truly open.
What I think should be teemed up with the OAL is the 'source code' of the music. If I make a song and release just the finished
No, no, you've got it all wrong. It's OK to control the chickens. Controlling the eggs is heresy. You've goaded me into posting my grocery store piece about the GPL. It's also available on Google's USENET archive if you search for it:
Nevermind where they are getting the value from, the bottom line is: are
they getting it?
As a customer, I look at a product and say: Does it do what I want? Is the
price reasonable?
If the answer to both these questions is YES, I buy the product.
The only way Free Software loses is by failing the 1st question, and that
happens quite a bit. Either a system is efficient at answering my two
questions, or it isn't, and Free Software is not the efficient system that
its advocates would like you to think it is. It's like, I want to buy eggs,
and the guy at the supermarket says:
"we have no eggs, but we have chickens. You can take the eggs for free when
they lay".
There is a long line for the free eggs, and the guy estimates the wait will
be 6 hours. Do you sit around waiting in line for eggs, or do you go next
door and buy them? Then this guy walks in and says:
"Hi, I'm Mr. IBM. I'd like to buy a chicken".
"Fine" says the clerk. "That'll be $1500."
So, Mr. IBM gets fresh eggs every day any way he likes them.
"This is ridiculous" you say. "I'm going next door".
"No" says the clerk. "selling eggs for money is evil. Eggs want to be
free".
"But you just sold a chicken for $1500. How is that any less evil than
selling eggs?".
"Don't ask me to explain it" says the clerk. "There is this bearded guy who
comes around preaching every day at 11 and he has a lot of followers. I'm
afraid to upset them".
The clerk had a wild look in his eye, so I stayed the full 6 hours. Quite
frankly, I was afraid what he might do with the meat cleaver.
I never went back to that market.
--$teve
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/cc.html
is an alternative to copyright. The sign [cc] indicates not copyright, but shows support for the public domain and stands for a willingness to share information the way traditional science has always operated. New Scientist ought to consider it instead of their license.
Please consider [cc] along with licenses for open or free works, which depend on copyright. As you know, all works are now copyrighted when first created and will not enter the public domain until the copyright term expires (if it ever does), some 70 or 50 years after your death. We need the public domain in order freely to recycle old works into new, now.
The OpenLaw site (http://openlaw.org) shows how Open Source or Free Software principles can be applied to legal projects, traditionally the domain of well-paid individual attorneys.
"What the net giveth the net taketh away"
The recent scandal by several historians shows that it becomes increasingly difficult to steal someone else's work and claim it as your own. The net makes it easy to find and copy other people's work. At the same time improved search engines make it easier to detect that this has happened.
What this doesn't address is money. Though it is easier to maintain authorship priority on the net, it doesn't prevent people from making free copies.
Besides OpenCola and OpenLaw, there are other places out there opening up information. Many of you might be familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, the classic RPG. A few years back the current owners (Wizards of the Coast) came out with a new version. But besides that, they opened up two different licenses (OGL (open gaming license) and D20) and opened up the majority of their game for use. A good place to get information on this is http://www.opengamingfoundation.org
=Blue(23)
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
I notice that lots of folks have criticisms about the article. I certainly do too. (eg: RJS must be having kittens about now for being referred to as having started the Open Source movement). And I know the ususal /. solution is to spell out these criticisms in follow-up postings.
:-)
:-)
However, this situation is different. Since the article is copylefted, rather than complain about it, let's just fix it!
So if anyone posts a criticism about the article here, post a "show me the source" reply.
@Title: The Great Giveaway
i ves.html
@Intro: Good ideas are worth money. So why are hard headed operators giving them away for free? Join our experiment to find out says Graham Lawton
@Body: IF YOU'VE BEEN to a computer show in recent months you might have seen it: a shiny silver drinks can wih a ring-pull logo and the words "opencola" on the side. Inside is a fizzy drink that tastes very much like Coca-Cola. Or is it Pepsi?
There's something else written on the can, though, which sets the drink apart. It says "check out the source at opencola.com". Go to that Web address and you'll see something that's not available on Coca-Cola's website, or Pepsi's--the recipe for cola. For the first time ever, you can make the real thing in your own home.
OpenCola is the world's first "open source" consumer product. By calling it open source, its manufacturer is saying that instructions for making it are freely available. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too, release their recipe into the public domain. As a way of doing business it's rather unusual--the Coca-Cola Company doesn't make a habit of giving away precious commercial secrets. But that's the point.
OpenCola is the most prominent sign yet that a long-running battle between rival philosophies in software development has spilt over into the rest of the world. What started as a technical debate over the best way to debug computer programs is developing into a political battle over the ownership of knowledge and how it is used, between those who put their faith in the free circulation of ideas and those who prefer to designate them "intellectual property". No one knows what the outcome will be. But in a world of growing opposition to corporate power, restrictive intellectual property rights and globalisation, open source is emerging as a possible alternative, a potentially potent means of fighting back. And you're helping to test its value right now.
The open source movement originated in 1984 when computer scientist Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT and set up the Free Software Foundation. His aim was to create high-quality software that was freely available to everybody. Stallman's beef was with commercial companies that smother their software with patents and copyrights and keep the source code--the original program, written in a computer language such as C++--a closely guarded secret. Stallman saw this as damaging. It generated poor-quality, bug-ridden software. And worse, it choked off the free flow of ideas. Stallman fretted that if computer scientists could no longer learn from one another's code, the art of programming would stagnate (New Scientist, 12 December 1998, p 42).
Stallman's move resonated round the computer science community and now there are thousands of similar projects. The star of the movement is Linux, an operating system created by Finnish student Linus Torvalds in the early 1990s and installed on around 18 million computers worldwide.
What sets open source software apart from commercial software is the fact that it's free, in both the political and the economic sense. If you want to use a commercial product such as Windows XP or Mac OS X you have to pay a fee and agree to abide by a licence that stops you from modifying or sharing the software. But if you want to run Linux or another open source package, you can do so without paying a penny--although several companies will sell you the software bundled with support services. You can also modify the software in any way you choose, copy it and share it without restrictions. This freedom acts as an open invitation--some say challenge--to its users to make improvements. As a result, thousands of volunteers are constantly working on Linux, adding new features and winkling out bugs. Their contributions are reviewed by a panel and the best ones are added to Linux. For programmers, the kudos of a successful contribution is its own reward. The result is a stable, powerful system that adapts rapidly to technological change. Linux is so successful that even IBM installs it on the computers it sells.
To maintain this benign state of affairs, open source software is covered by a special legal instrument called the General Public License. Instead of restricting how the software can be used, as a standard software license does, the GPL--often known as a "copyleft"--grants as much freedom as possible (see http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.html). Software released under the GPL (or a similar copyleft licence) can be copied, modified and distributed by anyone, as long as they, too, release it under a copyleft. That restriction is crucial, because it prevents the material from being co-opted into later proprietary products. It also makes open source software different from programs that are merely distributed free of charge. In FSF's words, the GPL "makes it free and guarantees it remains free".
Open source has proved a very successful way of writing software. But it has also come to embody a political stand--one that values freedom of expression, mistrusts corporate power, and is uncomfortable with private ownership of knowledge. It's "a broadly libertarian view of the proper relationship between individuals and institutions", according to open source guru Eric Raymond.
But it's not just software companies that lock knowledge away and release it only to those prepared to pay. Every time you buy a CD, a book, a copy of New Scientist, even a can of Coca-Cola, you're forking out for access to someone else's intellectual property. Your money buys you the right to listen to, read or consume the contents, but not to rework them, or make copies and redistribute them. No surprise, then, that people within the open source movement have asked whether their methods would work on other products. As yet no one's sure--but plenty of people are trying it.
Take OpenCola. Although originally intended as a promotional tool to explain open source software, the drink has taken on a life of its own. The Toronto-based OpenCola company has become better known for the drink than the software it was supposed to promote. Laird Brown, the company's senior strategist, attributes its success to a widespread mistrust of big corporations and the "proprietary nature of almost everything". A website selling the stuff has shifted 150,000 cans. Politically minded students in the US have started mixing up the recipe for parties.
OpenCola is a happy accident and poses no real threat to Coke or Pepsi, but elsewhere people are deliberately using the open source model to challenge entrenched interests. One popular target is the music industry. At the forefront of the attack is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group set up to defend civil liberties in the digital society. In April of last year, the EFF published a model copyleft called the Open Audio License (OAL). The idea is to let musicians take advantage of digital music's properties--ease of copying and distribution--rather than fighting against them. Musicians who release music under an OAL consent to their work being freely copied, performed, reworked and reissued, as long as these new products are released under the same licence. They can then rely on "viral distribution" to get heard. "If the people like the music, they will support the artist to ensure the artist can continue to make music," says Robin Gross of the EFF.
It's a little early to judge whether the OAL will capture imaginations in the same way as OpenCola. But it's already clear that some of the strengths of open source software simply don't apply to music. In computing, the open source method lets users improve software by eliminating errors and inefficient bits of code, but it's not obvious how that might happen with music. In fact, the music is not really "open source" at all. The files posted on the OAL music website http://www.openmusicregistry.org so far are all MP3s and Ogg Vorbises--formats which allow you to listen but not to modify.
It's also not clear why any mainstream artists would ever choose to release music under an OAL. Many bands objected to the way Napster members circulated their music behind their backs, so why would they now allow unrestricted distribution, or consent to strangers fiddling round with their music? Sure enough, you're unlikely to have heard of any of the 20 bands that have posted music on the registry. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Open Audio amounts to little more than an opportunity for obscure artists to put themselves in the shop window.
The problems with open music, however, haven't put people off trying open source methods elsewhere. Encyclopedias, for example, look like fertile ground. Like software, they're collaborative and modular, need regular upgrading, and improve with peer review. But the first attempt, a free online reference called Nupedia, hasn't exactly taken off. Two years on, only 25 of its target 60,000 articles have been completed. "At the current rate it will never be a large encyclopedia," says editor-in-chief Larry Sanger. The main problem is that the experts Sanger wants to recruit to write articles have little incentive to participate. They don't score academic brownie points in the same way software engineers do for upgrading Linux, and Nupedia can't pay them.
It's a problem that's inherent to most open source products: how do you get people to chip in? Sanger says he's exploring ways to make money out of Nupedia while preserving the freedom of its content. Banner adverts are a possibility. But his best hope is that academics start citing Nupedia articles so authors can earn academic credit.
There's another possibility: trust the collective goodwill of the open source community. A year ago, frustrated by the treacle-like progress of Nupedia, Sanger started another encyclopedia named Wikipedia (the name is taken from open source Web software called WikiWiki that allows pages to be edited by anyone on the Web). It's a lot less formal than Nupedia: anyone can write or edit an article on any topic, which probably explains the entries on beer and Star Trek. But it also explains its success. Wikipedia already contains 19,000 articles and is acquiring several thousand more each month. "People like the idea that knowledge can and should be freely distributed and developed," says Sanger. Over time, he reckons, thousands of dabblers should gradually fix any errors and fill in any gaps in the articles until Wikipedia evolves into an authoritative encyclopedia with hundreds of thousands of entries.
Another experiment that's proved its worth is the OpenLaw project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Berkman lawyers specialise in cyberlaw--hacking, copyright, encryption and so on--and the centre has strong ties with the EFF and the open source software community. In 1998 faculty member Lawrence Lessig, now at Stanford Law School, was asked by online publisher Eldritch Press to mount a legal challenge to US copyright law. Eldritch takes books whose copyright has expired and publishes them on the Web, but new legislation to extend copyright from 50 to 70 years after the author's death was cutting off its supply of new material. Lessig invited law students at Harvard and elsewhere to help craft legal arguments challenging the new law on an online forum, which evolved into OpenLaw.
Normal law firms write arguments the way commercial software companies write code. Lawyers discuss a case behind closed doors, and although their final product is released in court, the discussions or "source code" that produced it remain secret. In contrast, OpenLaw crafts its arguments in public and releases them under a copyleft. "We deliberately used free software as a model," says Wendy Selzer, who took over OpenLaw when Lessig moved to Stanford. Around 50 legal scholars now work on Eldritch's case, and OpenLaw has taken other cases, too.
"The gains are much the same as for software," Selzer says. "Hundreds of people scrutinise the 'code' for bugs, and make suggestions how to fix it. And people will take underdeveloped parts of the argument, work on them, then patch them in." Armed with arguments crafted in this way, OpenLaw has taken Eldritch's case--deemed unwinnable at the outset--right through the system and is now seeking a hearing in the Supreme Court.
There are drawbacks, though. The arguments are in the public domain right from the start, so OpenLaw can't spring a surprise in court. For the same reason, it can't take on cases where confidentiality is important. But where there's a strong public interest element, open sourcing has big advantages. Citizens' rights groups, for example, have taken parts of OpenLaw's legal arguments and used them elsewhere. "People use them on letters to Congress, or put them on flyers," Selzer says.
The open content movement is still at an early stage and it's hard to predict how far it will spread. "I'm not sure there are other areas where open source would work," says Sanger. "If there were, we might have started it ourselves." Eric Raymond has also expressed doubts. In his much-quoted 1997 essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he warned against applying open source methods to other products. "Music and most books are not like software, because they don't generally need to be debugged or maintained," he wrote. Without that need, the products gain little from others' scrutiny and reworking, so there's little benefit in open sourcing. "I do not want to weaken the winning argument for open sourcing software by tying it to a potential loser," he wrote.
But Raymond's views have now shifted subtly. "I'm more willing to admit that I might talk about areas other than software someday," he told New Scientist. "But not now." The right time will be once open source software has won the battle of ideas, he says. He expects that to happen around 2005.
And so the experiment goes on. As a contribution to it, New Scientist has agreed to issue this article under a copyleft. That means you can copy it, redistribute it, reprint it in whole or in part, and generally play around with it as long as you, too, release your version under a copyleft and abide by the other terms and conditions in the licence. We also ask that you inform us of any use you make of the article, by e-mailing copyleft@newscientist.com.
One reason for doing so is that by releasing it under a copyleft, we can print the recipe for OpenCola without violating its copyleft. If nothing else, that demonstrates the power of the copyleft to spread itself. But there's another reason, too: to see what happens. To my knowledge this is the first magazine article published under a copyleft. Who knows what the outcome will be? Perhaps the article will disappear without a trace. Perhaps it will be photocopied, redistributed, re-edited, rewritten, cut and pasted onto websites, handbills and articles all over the world. I don't know--but that's the point. It's not up to me any more. The decision belongs to all of us.
@Furtherreading: The source code of this article plus details of the conditions can be found at http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/copyleft
For a selection of copylefts, see http://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/open_alternat
The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond is available at http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
@BoxTitle: Copyright © 2002 Reed Business Information Ltd, England
@BoxBody:THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt
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This whole concept of open source is really old hat to civil and mechanical engineers. Almost technical design standards for structural and mechanical engineering are developed in what more-or-less could be considered a copy-left, open source methodology. As changes are suggested to design codes, they are reviewed by the community and voted on before be implemented into the codes. Design codes for steel, wood and concrete structures have all been developed this way, as have the boiler and pressure vessel codes that mechanical engineers love so much.
No one has a lock on usage of these design methods, and they are open to everyone (with enough brain power to understand, anyway). If one suggested proprietary design standards in this community, you would be laughed out of the room. The computer software community needs to gets it act together. I suggest you start by emulating civil engineers.
P.S. Note that Civil Engineering is Course I at MIT. We have been doing this for a while.
That's ridiculous, eggs are scarce, physical goods, software is non-scarce, abstract. They are not comparable, and your entire argument is an exercise in strawmannery.
Though they talk about Stallman a lot, the article tends to blur 'free software' and 'open source'. I could see RMS forking this article.
And also, from the article: "[Linux source code] contributions are reviewed by a panel and the best ones are added to Linux." (emphasis mine)
Yeah, reviewed by a panel of one?
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2002 OSDN.
I'm afraid that the numerous reproductions of the article in comments on this page can't both be "owned by the Poster" and meet the conditions of the New Statesman licence regarding redistribution. Sue each other at will.
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This is a great post and I'm personally going to make a note of your bolded/emphasized summary of the GPL, because it is so clear. (I'm trying to work on a Master's thesis on the question of whether GPL-ish licenses have any place, beyond software, in the context of international development. Your bolds and important pauses make it clear what the GPL is.)
I found one aspect of your post confusing, though, at first.
Q. If, for example, research results are published under copyleft, would that mean that any subsequent work that cites the research would also have to be copyleft? [...]
A. [...] If we're talking specifically about the GPL, then yes, that's exactly what it means.
In fact, that isn't what it means. (Although you may have been mostly referring in your response to the latter part of the original poster's question, which I omitted above, I didn't realize it at first.)
As you explained later for those who took the time to read your full post --
In your case, if you find some GPL research that you want to build on, but without making your research GPL, then treat the GPL work as a fully copyrighted work. You can quote selectively from it using the existing fair use defence [...].
IMHO, this is exactly right. The license, GPL or otherwise, is a copyright license and as such, restricts only what copyright will allow. If normal copyright would permit the citation, (i.e., footnotes/bibliographies/appropriately-brief quotations), then you have nothing to fear from copyleft.
The point of the pro-GPL people from the outset is that people should not have the right to put the kind of restrictions on software that they do. They see no problem with the restrictions of the GPL because they obstruct an 'author's control' that they believe shouldn't exist in the first place. Unfortunately the whole GPL/LGPL/MPL/whateverPL/kitchensinkPL/etc. mess is the best attempt to date.
Public domain would be nice if the IP laws were significantly weaker (e.g. no barring from reverse engineering and disseminating what's found, no barring from modifying your copy, nor from explaining to someone else how to modify theirs), unfortunately this isn't the case, and so it isn't the case that software released as public domain will stay that way (if company A forks the code making theirs proprietary, the main distribution of the PD code vanishes, and those that still have copies can't stand up to the onslaught of lawyers launched by company A, then the PD version will vanish). In any case, if it is rapidly obsoleted, (which is what proprietary forks do---far more so than necessary) then it will fade from view.
As things stand, if all software today was public domain, but I could see a big market for 'my little modificaton', I could add some extra 'inoperability' features and use my killer feature to bring over customers. Everyone else is then playing catch-up. If a large number of people do this, then properietary software will overtake public domain software --in the short term-- (note that long-term consequences have no bearing whatsoever). In a short space of time, the needs of shareholders take precedence over all else.
John_Chalisque
But it's already clear that some of the strengths of open source software simply don't apply to music. In computing, the open source method lets users improve software by eliminating errors and inefficient bits of code, but it's not obvious how that might happen with music. In fact, the music is not really "open source" at all. The files posted on the OAL music website http://www.openmusicregistry.org so far are all MP3s and Ogg Vorbises--formats which allow you to listen but not to modify.
Only nerds would confuse the medium (MP3, Ogg ) with the music. To see Open Source Music in action go to a Folk Music Festival or Jazz Club. What you'll see is late-night jam sessions full of old-timers demonstrating licks for neophytes who then incorporate them into new music. You'll also see older musicians excited to learn a new style from younger musicians. These venues are hothouses of creativity where everyone is borrowing, adapting and perfecting. Sounds pretty much like Open Source to me!
That's ridiculous, eggs are scarce, physical goods, software is non-scarce, abstract.
Software is a representation of labor on the part of the developer, which is not abstract or non-scarce at all. People who make your argument see only the golden egg, and forget about the goose (or chicken).
They are not comparable, and your entire argument is an exercise in strawmannery.
They are comparable. The eggs are programs. The programmers are chicken--afraid to participate in the entreprenurial system and content to find foundations, charities, or corporations who will pay them adequatly in exchange for the reduced risk. This in and of itself doesn't bother me. Risk is not for everybody. It's the moral posturing I find offensive. I have seen no better explanation of what the Free Software advocates desire. They think it's perfectly fine to sell themselves to a company, but they think it's immoral to sell what they produce. The Free Software movement is already replicating a classic soviet-style economy in which people line up for goods, waiting on the producers. If you don't believe me, just install that nice user-friendly HURD OS.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
New Scientist is a respected publication. For them to do this should cast doubts on other editors who might consider it. Namely I am thinking of sites like Indymedia.org whose purpose is to get their pieces out there and widely distribute. What better way to do that then to copyleft it in this manner? Then people locally could even print out the latest edition of their web site and distribute it locally in their neighborhood ... a "copyleft paper" ...
Unfortunately, the original responder to your story was correct: your metaphor is bullshit, as is most of your rebuttal. Your eggs can't be perfectly copied & distributed to others by the "customers" like software can, which pretty sinks the entire metaphor.
As far as your moral posturing about moral posturing, you are also mischaracterizing the motivations of many "Open Source" programmers. They are CAPITALISTS, in the true sense of the word; they prefer to be compensated for providing a service to somebody. It's only dolts like you who think that you should be paid every time somebody besides the original purchaser uses the software, even though you didn't do any additional work to deserve it. That's a lot more like Soviet-style communism than your attempt at obfuscation.
Something like, if you take this work and make yourself the hero and make the bad guys more evil and the challenges more overwhelming and so on, then it must be released under the fable license as well.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
Of course it is possible to convert these into mp3 or whatever, if you want to distribute them in 'binary only'.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Q. Does the idea of copyleft make sense for things other than software?
...),
:-)
A. Only in so far as there is value in copying beyond fair use.
On the question of utility, (and supposing for the moment that we like the viral aspect of copyleft/GPL), I think I would amend the answer above to:
It does, to the extent there are (potentially) valuable uses of your content which would not be covered by the doctrine of 'fair use'.
Copyleft not only removes restrictions on copying and redistribution, but also for modification and redistribution. It is a license for collaboration.
So, if you can think of any way that someone else might build off copyrightable content you have created, (be it research/writings, music, art, maps
and if you want to allow them to do so freely and without reliance upon permissions from you, (i.e., you don't care about having the right to veto changes you disapprove of),
and you can live with the possibility of them getting paid and you not,
BUT you feel that in return for your giving them these extra rights to make use of your work, they should agree to continue to give these rights to whomever else wants to work on the result (the combined product of your original work and their modifications/additions to it),
then, YES, Copyleft makes sense.
Examples? (I don't know, I never said I create content.)
Off the top of my head:
Maybe you made a wonderful map of a region, but you want to leave open the chance that others will improve on specific areas and pass the whole thing along. (and you're willing to take the risk that they botch the whole thing up)
Maybe you don't mind if people take your song, add an extra verse, (or change a person's name), and pass it on. (and you're willing to take the risk that some bozo will fill that verse with beowulf clusters and profanity)
Maybe you've made a simple customized textbook and you'd be pleased as punch if people drop out the half where you didn't really know what you were talking about and replace it with something really informative. (and you're willing to take the chance that they drop out the half where you did really know what you were talking about and leave the junk half).
Copyleft makes as much sense in the non-software world as it does the software world... But maybe (original thought coming on?) in the non-software world giving away these freedoms is harder to take.
Actually, now that I think of it: it's not that coders are less sensitive, but could it be that in software the functional aspect of code is a built-in bozo filter for ill-conceived changes? (If the modifications break it they probably won't get far. Few people, (MSFT jokes aside), will have a strong/ideological attachment to broken/malfunctioning code. In changing writings/music/art I see more liklihood of offending the original author. (and now wait to be corrected by protective coders and/or those mercilessly flamed by them.)
Frankly, intellectual property - particularly when its restrictions never lift, as in the cases of binary-distributed software and of ever-lengthening copyright - is monarchist, both as a matter of historical heritage and as a matter of political philosophy. Real capitalism regards it as a necessary evil.
Rid yourself of moral posturing until you can get those monarchist tendencies out of your system.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I've asked sourceforge.net to provide a CVS repository for this document. If they do, I'll be pettitioning the editors to add the story :) Cross fingers!
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
That has the advantage of still being protected by all current laws.
has an Open Game License agreement for the distrobution of the mechanics of the game...
How about:
Although the files are easy to play and listen to, they are not the "source" of the music, but rather its end result. Even in electronically composed music, where it is easier to distribute the "source" files from which the listenable end product is derived, there are relatively few musicians making those "source" files available.
I couldn't quite figure out how to work in the phraseology about "source" being the form preferred for modification of the work.
Also, there is at least one open-source musician who does make his source files available: Void Main.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
</thinkingoutloud>
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
The article is nice but I wish they'd learn the difference between the Open Source Movement and the Free Software Movement. The Free Software Movement is what RMS started in 1984, what is properly associated with copyleft and what should be mentioned so frequently in NewScientist's article. Open Source advocates are, ironically enough, anxious to avoid talking about freedom and ethics. The Open Source Movement encourages you to license your copyrighted software under the new BSD license or another license that essentially makes your software a gift to business. It's the older Free Software Movement that stresses greater societal software rights, using a copylefted free software license (such as the GNU GPL) so derivatives of your work can't be made non-free.
Digital Citizen
And it's neither accredited nor peer-reviewed. It's like reading the old Discovery or Omni magazines - take everything you read with a grain of salt, because it could be just so much bullshit.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
It's only dolts like you who think that you should be paid every time somebody besides the original purchaser uses the software
Ad hominem, but I'll address the rational part: When software is free, there are precious few "original purchasers".
I can tell I've touched a raw nerve with some people... that always happens when you confront a bad religion, which is essentially what the GNU philosophy is.
To be fair, I painted with a broad brush. Their *are* capitalists in the Open Source world, it's just that they aren't *software* capitalists. They are capitalists in some other industry who happen to have business models where software fits in as a loss-leader. It's like giving away razors to sell blades. Businesses with Free Software first-sale as the only line of revenue simply don't exist. Turn over any successful "free software business" and you will find consulting, services, distribution, customization, or something else that really makes the money. I addressed all of that in the USENET posting.
Try to keep an open mind. I don't hate you. In fact, whoever you are, I love you as a fellow human being enough to care that you don't continue to believe lies.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Addionally, genes occasionally hop to other species and even phyla. So, the "closed source" crops won't retain too much of an advantage for many decades unless the companies are able to eliminate the seed stock for the traditional seeds. That said, it's interesting research.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The "New Statesman" has no license regarding the redistribution of the article. Now if you want to talk about the New Scientist...