Sunday 13 January 2008

Copyfarleft?

Yep, Copyfarleft. No really. No honestly I'm not kidding, I think they are serious. See:




Its as if the soviet union never existed, and all the failures which led to the downfall of that empire are not failures at all. Kleiner talks about 'art' in the context of Copyleft GPL, but this licence was designed for software only - not for artistic expressions such as music, plays etc. A better way for these is the Creative Commons. Artists should look to licenses based on this, not the GPL! The concept of 'copyjustright' seems to make sense for artistic works. The DRM issue is not directly related to SCO vs IBM case re: Linux and trying to make a direct link makes no sense at all. A piece of music is not the same as a piece of software (the former does not need to be maintained, the latter does). This misunderstanding makes the article pretty incoherent. Companies get involved in open source (or free) software development, largely because of the technical and economic benefits which accrue - they don't 'own' the software, property in terms of free and open source software is something of a fuzzy issue.



The article puts forward the notion that Copyfarleft could be applied to artistic works. I'm interested in the idea as applied to software. Copyfarleft discriminates against a) groups and b) individuals. Any license based on this concept (assuming it could be enforced legally) would reduce the number of people using and developing the software, and therefore reduce the effectiveness of the open source development model (less eyeballs on code). It isn't going to work for software.

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