Category: Free Culture

It’s Newspeak, and for a good example of a “Hybrid Source” project of mixed Open Source (BSD) and proprietary code, look no further than Windows. Its networking code was shown to have come from BSD. Yes, the world’s most successful proprietary software is “Hybrid Source”. Which Ken Brown says destroys the value of intellectual property and should be shunned by government.

On the plus side, obviously Microsoft’s new best friend Sun can’t use an evil, hybrid-source license like the GPL for Solaris and Java. They’ll have to use an asset-stripping license, which will allow other proprietary software vendors (such as Microsoft) to cherry-pick their code. But at least they won’t see the reduction in value of their intellectual property that they would if they went GPL. Um…

http://www.openclipart.org/

The only license they use is Public Domain, which I understand from a commercial point of view, but it would have been nicer to have a choice of the Creative Commons licenses. I’d add my work if I could CC it.

There’s nothing to stop you taking the work and combining it with your own work to make something that you then CC. That’s the disadvantage of the Public Domain: you can steal from it. But this can work for value creation as well as for asset stripping.

I really do think there’s a need for a creative equivalent of SourceForge; a host for creative projects. Computer game projects put graphics, sound and other content under version control, so artists can certainly do it. For Open creative projects, keeping track of submissions and being able to roll them back is vital to avoid any copyright infringement problems.

If only I was any good at writing NESTA funding proposals. 🙂

They cover music and combining works much better than the 1.0 license, but miss the crucial “representation of authority to contribute” clause that makes people think about whether they really are allowed to release Star Wars as Open Content. This was too strict in the original license, but is present in a milder form in several other licenses, and should have been kept in a watered-down form IMHO.

If you are making music or want a good license that allows the kind of cross-media explosion that Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture” has seen, this is the license for you. If you are concerned about preventing the SCOs of this world attacking Free Culture, the Free Software Foundation’s procedures for handling contributions may provide a good model.

Congratulations to the CC team for getting these licenses out and for robustly enabling cross-media Free Culture.

http://www.anz.com/edna/dictionary.asp?action=content&content=asset_stripping

An “asset stripping license” would be one that allowed work to be broken up and sold off by an asset stripper (or “cultural raider”) without any value returning. This would be done to make sure that business isn’t scared of the work and feels comfortable using it, as per “Open Source” vs. “Free Software”.

“Value creation” is revenue generation that is “greater than the sum of its parts”. Good management, customer loyalty, new products and services and other innovation or good corporate citizenship can add value.

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_8/cedergren/

A “value creation” license would be a “Gift Economy” license (still don’t like that phrase…), ensuring that value is returned with use and protecting against asset stripping, literally creating value in the commons.

Both terms are ones that businesspeople will recognise, and so are useful for boosting or disparaging concepts in that arena.

Clip art is horrible. Here’s an opportunity to change that… 🙂

This is one of the few times in history where art can be effectively political. Not by content but by the way it is made and distributed. Put anything you make under a Creative Commons license (make sure you understand the legal implications of this…) and let people build on your work.

Now, out of a cathedral and a bazaar, which has an overarching design, and which is a chaotic mess?

Abandoning principles for popularity doesn’t make sense when doing so prevents that very popularity…