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Free Culture

The Libre Labyrinth

The excellent Greg London has a new book on Free Culture and Free Software out:

I just uploaded a first draft of my new book,
“Libre Labyrinth” to my website.

While working out some issues with what an
Open Hardware license would need to be comparable
to the GNU-GPL, I came up with a Venn Diagram
that describes how copyright, patents, functionality,
DRM, and other concepts can affect a FLOS project.

It turns out that this diagram ends up being a
completely objective way to describe, compare,
and contrast any sort of license, without resorting
to subjective terms such as “Free” or “Libre” or
“Open Source”.

The book also goes into a brief discussion of scalability
of a project, which is independent of the license
you choose for your project. The section on scalability
discusses issues such as Brook’s Law, where it does and
does not apply, parallel versus sequential tasks, and
the amount of overhead added to a project per person added.

It’s about 80 pages and is licensed CC-BY

You can download it here:

http://www.greglondon.com/libre/