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RMS says Creative Commons Unacceptable
Mr A Coward writes "Richard Stallman has stated in an interview that he no longer supports Creative Commons licenses. In the interview carried on LinuxP2P.com, and which is largely about the P2P and DRM issues, Stallman ends by saying: 'I no longer endorse Creative Commons. I cannot endorse Creative Commons as a whole, because some of its licenses are unacceptable.' He suggests instead using the GPL for creative works." The crux of his argument is that, since he disagrees with some of the CC licenses, and people tend to lump them all together, he feels compelled to reject them all. What's your take? Are some Creative Commons licenses worth using, even if others aren't?
Several years ago, I heard Stallman speak at a lecture at my university. He was clearly very smart, and very driven by ideological goals. On top of all that, there was also a hint of that indefinable quality shared by most crazy people. Something about him was not quite right--I got a sense that his grasp on reality was slipping a bit. Maybe this is necessary for a person to make the kind of sacrifices he has, but it's a dangerous balance.
From reading the recent draft of the GPL v3, and the article attached to this story, I get a sense that he's slipped further. For instance, when he spoke at my university, he recognized that the best way to achieve your goals is to have limited, realistic goals, and focus on those. When people asked him about copyright on music or movies, he diplomatically dodged the question and said it was a separate issue from his Free Software philosophy, and he didn't want to address it. In the interview linked in TFA, he outright attacks copyright for these things. The GPL v3's attack on DRM is similar. Stallman has sacrificed the clarity and readibility of the GPL v2 in order to attack patents and DRM.
Now, maybe you agree with Stallman about copyright for music, etc. Even so, you should recognize that that puts you farther outside the mainstream, and it's much harder to change the mainstream when you're 1,000 miles away. If a bunch of Americans write letters to Congress demanding that copyright be abolished*, they will be ignored. If they ask that copyright law take a step back towards the original constitutional idea of limited (in time and power) protection to promote progress in science and the useful arts, that may actually get somewhere. It is vitally important that we sound reasonable.
Stallman has lost his sense of perspective and his grasp on reality. I think it's possible that he is now harmful to the Free Software movement, and the community needs to think about how to deal with this problem. If the community asked him to step down, would he?
* I know Stallman didn't outright call for the abolition of copyright. Still, the changes he wants (the freedom for anyone to distribute any published work) amount to nearly the same thing.
The CC licenses are not upfront about what terms they contain and their names are deceptive. For example the sampling+ license might as well be a completely commercial 'no rights' license, since all it permits would be allowed by fair use anyways.
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This has clearly caused confusion, for example the freesounds project claims to be making freely available sound samples... A good goal indeed, but they have chosen the sampling+ license, thus making their samples not free at all. (This is not only been noticed by RMS, I found this discussion: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/11/msg0
Sampling+ isn't the first example of this... For example CC created a CC-wiki license which allows website operators to take attribution from creators. It's not bad if you're upfront about it, but they werent... WORSE, they went and snuck these terms into CC-BY-SA-2.1 without comment or even updating the 'human readable' version of the license.
Stallman is an ideologist.
Lessig is a jurist/lawyer with real-world/practicable ideas.
I used to be an RMS hate-ah until I noticed how he's always been right looking back. I still don't get why people get their panties in a bunch over profiteering. It's one thing to "produce" "content" or make a product or provide a service and sell it for reasonable amounts. It's another to be greedy and overvalue your work. For example, I saw this one guy who did some work in a Windows domain to resolve some naming issues. The company he did the consulting for was charged $250 an hour for his time. But since I know how to do exactly what he did, I'd say he overvalued his work. Reconfiguring users, groups and file sharing permisions in an AD domain is not a rocket scientist. It's drudgery, sure... but it's not worth $250 an hour. At best, maybe $15 an hour. He spent four days working on it and put in four hour days. So he made off with $4000 to do that work and the company paid gladly! In my opinion, they were scammed. They would have been far better off just hiring their own IT guy at $60,000 a year to handle those issues as they occur. Who cares if he spends the rest of his time playing World of Warcraft? Even if he only does the same kind of work the consultant did 15 times in a year (typical for most Windows admins), they would break even. Now THAT's some business sense you can use!
The same thing with music. The crap that the music industry and the RIAA controlled music machine produces might be popular, but that doesn't mean it has value. In truth, the songs you hear vomiting out of your radios and CD players daily might be worth about $.10 a pop. Paying $.50 per track to download is massive profit for the music industry. But they want more! THey can't get enough money! And that's what's wrong. These fuckers need to be taught a lesson. Back in the 80s I used to be able to buy a new record for $7.00. The record would have an average of 10-12 songs on it. That worked out to about $.58 per track which was robbery back then. If I was to release my work for public consumption and charged just $1.00 per album, I guarantee I'd be well within my rights. But if I did it expecting $20 an album, that would be ridiculous. That's what the RIAA controlled music machine is doing. STOP THEM NOW!!!
So in conclusion I have to say the problem is when people believe they are entitled to more money than they deserve for their work. Oh and another thing... it's all the fault of the middle man. Analyze every facet of our society and look for the middle man. You'll notice something. He doesn't actually do anything useful but typically gets paid a lot more than the people who do the real work. Think about the CEO who was just a venture capitalist and put some money into a project to bring it to fruition. Yes, he took a risk and maybe the product worked out. Yes, he deserves something in return. However, these guys usualy go nuts and keep 90% of the money for themselves then give the actual inventor/creator a pittance. If Linus Torvalds had turned to VCs for getting Linux out there, you can bet it never would have worked out as it did now. There's be some bloated fat idiot talking about the profits of his company and their bold venture into the Unix-like OS business. Linus would either be dead or fired or making the wage of a janitor somewhere in that company.
So in conclusion let me say that this all proves that there is something fundamentally wrong with the whole of humanity and I call for a complete code audit of the species' DNA. Somewhere along the line something wrong got injected and it resulted in the fucked up world we have now where money is king and the poor are shit upon. Destroy all capitalist dogs!!!! Down with commies!!! Eliminate the anarchists!!! Deneuter the Dadaist!!!! Spay the white supremacists!!!!, Trepan the Moonies!!!! and overall... don't forget the sperm whale!!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Where have you been? RMS ideas have never changed. Not once. He's always been about "open and free in every sense of the word", period. He was that way long before the "national media" took notice of him and my bet is that he will be that way until the day he dies.
For all of you people wanting to negate him to the "fringe" or "off the deep end" I would remind you that his ideas may be far over to one side of the scale but he has accomplished many, many things. Without his "fanatical" devotion to the idea of open and free software Linux as we know it today would not exist.
What I find most amusing is that his ideas are not all that new. He champions the old ways of doing things where ideas and science and artistic vision were freely shared. The fact that some of you are so interred with the way things are done now that you simply cannot see merit in the ideas of RMS or his like is just sad. Somewhere George Orwell is smiling.
I like the GPL and use it for software, but it's just not right for things like text. For instance, I can use my GPL-given right to revise and extend Richard Stallman's text to read:
And from the /. article summary: "He suggests instead using the GPL for creative works." RMS would never recommend that, there exists the GNU Free Documentation License for documents, and this is most likely what RMS would recommend.
And in fact, actually reading the article gives you this RMS quote: "However, [the GPL's] requirements are inconvenient for works that one might want to print and publish in a book, so I don't recommend using it for manuals, or for novels." I too believe Stallman is misguided in this particular instance, but don't put words in his mouth, he has a hard enough time getting his foot in there.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
Can you clarify? If you mean the section about displaying the copyright notice, firstly: the same exception as GPL2 appears AFAIK and secondly, there no requirement for it to be inside the binary itself, you could load the notice from disk if you wanted to.
The Creative Commons never wanted to be a free umbrella. Their goal is to create a standard for licenses. Artistic work used to have a big number of hard to understand licenses, so the CC people created a small set of them that is suitable to almost everybody, and made it available.
So RMS hit it exactly on the head. When you read that something is published on a CC license, you know nothing about your rights. But after you read the license name, you know exactly what it says (so all of you who put works under CC, please tell me the license name). That said, CC was very sucessfull on that, because its licenses cover almost all needs, from the most free work to the most resticted one. But FSF can not recomend you to use CC licenses on general, because, on general, they aren't free.
As usual, people bashing RMS don't know what they are talking about. As the interviewer: "There must be some basic misunderstanding here. If a work is released under the GPL, then the GPL's terms apply to it. How could it possibly be otherwise?". Great answer :).
Rethinking email
Yea, and if you think about it, the only reason why he is like that is that Xerox refused to give the poor guy the sources for the driver of their laser printer when he wanted to fix a bug.
If Microsoft had known what would happen as a result, they might have acquired Xerox and given give him the source code, and RMS would have gone back to his cubicle.
Then we wouldn't be asked to spell Linux with a capital 'G' today... ;-)
"Information cannot be sold, it lacks the fundamental characteristics for it to be so."
Reproduction, copies of information, cannot be usefully sold as it lacks scarcity. That essentially puts it outside of the functional realm of property; any scarcity is purely artificial, and introducing artificial scarcity in an economy basically undermines and damages the economy as a whole. Creating artificial scarcity is more or less the economic equal of wholesale destruction of wealth and property.
We could put a huge glass bubble over a country, bottle all the air and force people to buy it. That would undoubtedly employ a lot of people, even increase the GDP, but for any sane definition of wealth, one would have to be truly warped to claim that would benefit the wealth of the society, or the economy, as a whole. And as an aside, in comparison with countries where the citizens were not forced to pay for bottled air, workers would cost more, with predictable effects...
You're right, of course, the propaganda blanket attempts to throughly confuse the issues. Artificial scarcity is unacceptable, and extra incentive systems must build on methods compatible with a free market. It's not like it's hard to do, there are any number of incentive systems that governments around the world use for various purposes. The monopoly systems of copyright and patents are grotesque abberations, not the common standard.
You're not the only person who has made a comment on this and there's no reason to think that this is how the final version of the license will stand. That's the whole purpose of the commenting process.
RMS needs to get his head out of software. Way back at the beginning of the Free Software movement, he said that his idea should be applied to software only, and not to other copyrightable materials. Now it appears that he has changed his mind and wants people to use a software-specific license on non-software products.
CC licenses are not meant for software.
A novel that is released under a CC NonCommercial or NonDeriv license might not meet the definition of Free Software, but who the fsck cares? It ain't *software*! Ditto for videos, music, websites, etc. Hell, not even his own GFDL documentatoin meets the Free Software definition!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
That same section appears in GPLv2, and if you could read through to the end you'll see it applies only to programs which _already_ display the copyright blabla. You simply may not remove it unless you're the copyright holder. So it's not a problem you've to worry about, though I don't think it really adds anything to the GPL. Except for advertisement for the first generation GNU software...
Copyright laws were introduced shortly after the invention of the printing press; but thanks for proving his point for him.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You're wrong. He did write the original versions of gcc and gdb, and Emacs among many other things. The original Emacs was ground breaking, not trivial as you allege. Whatever else you may think of him, RMS's code contributions are huge.
His biography is pretty good. See also his Wikipedia entry.