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  • From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
  • To: cc-uk <cc-uk AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-uk] Proposed 'CC in the UK' website
  • Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 15:53:34 +0100

On 19 Jun 2005, at 15:42, David Hirst wrote:

Having just read Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture" book, and followed it up
with Richard Stallman's essays "Free Software, Free Society", with a side
journey into "Free as in Freedom" I strongly support the point made about
avoiding proprietary licences. If there is no acceptable free alternative,
then I think we can live without flashiness.

The animations are incredibly effective for communicating the basic ideas to audiences, though (I saw this effect at Liquid Culture, it was striking). I agree that Free Culture must not be thwarted by non- Free formats, but there are no practical alternatives to Flash at this time, and the FSF are working on a Free Flash. Hopefully this is a historical moment rather than a historical error...

A further, short diversion was to "Wide Open" the Demos pamphlet on Open
Source Methods and their future potential. But this seems rather
superficial, and misses the key driver of freedom behind the whole movement.

People who use "Open" rather than "Free" lack the conceptual framework to guide their choices and actions that the idea of "Freedom" gives. "Open" projects can have trouble answering fundamental questions about values and direction because of this.

They seem also to have felt it necessary to create their own derivative of
the CC licence, while paying lip service to its "inspiration". This adds the
substantial overhead of understanding what the differences are, why, and
whether they are tolerable.

This is the "everyone must have their own license" antipattern that is causing so much trouble in the Open Source Software world at the moment. The BBC could also be seen as being guilty of this.

- Rob.




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