Hi all,
I’m finding this a very interesting discussion ful of varied points.
I just wanted to offer pointers which would clarify some things regarding “Open Source” and FLOSS. Especially in the context of resistance to power structures and systemic opression via concepts and laws in connection to intellectual property, copyright and trademarks.
‘Open Source’ is a very wide term (also a trademark, but I think that’s irrelevant) - it includes work licenced with the intention to give freedom to society - to “do good” for everyone, but also work licenced with intention to give maximum freedom to individual and entrepreneur/companies (well exploited by google and many others). so there’s a wide spectrum of ways how to ‘open-source’ something.
I think the most known is the difference between OSI and FSF, where the former has an intention to foster inovation and exploitation of software by individuals and companies in a (neo?)liber/tarial/an way (BSD-syle permissive licences, do anything you want), and the latter wants to prevent proprietization, and instead gives certain use and distribution conditions in order to foster more software to be/come ‘libre’ (free as in speech, not beer). [more]
An important note here is that in order to make software “libre” (and therefore protect it from being ‘closed’ and not distributed as widely as possible), legaly this is an upgrade on top of copyright. In other words, to copyleft something, it needs a copyright (yes, ownership) to be legaly binding. AFAIK software protected by GNU GPL was not tried in court because the licence is that strong that companies that were notified about breaching the licence stoped using that software or open source GPL’ed their part of software (as demanded by that licence).
Of course there’s also public domain that gives no obligation to anyone to NOT ‘close’ any derivatives (forks, upgrades).
yes, this was a good point in the 80s and 90s. But in these times information/data is (also) the new oil for the corporations and surveillance capitalism. my own answer is this "the point of trying to restrict the flow of information (software) is to channel it to those in need, and restrict it when it wants to flow in the direction of exploitative greedy multinationals who don’t pay taxes and don’t care about anything but the flow of cash. In this sense, there’s a very interesting proposition called Peer Production Licence which at its core has the idea to allow all copying of software/creative work only to certain types of users: commoners, cooperatives and nonprofits
The peer production license is an example of the Copyfair type of license, in which only other commoners, cooperatives and nonprofits can share and re-use the material, but not commercial entities intent on making profit through the commons without explicit reciprocity . This fork on the original text of the Creative Commons non-commercial variant makes the PPL an explicitly anti-capitalist version of the CC-NC. It only allows commercial exploitation by collectives in which the ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the value creators, and where any surplus is distributed equally among them (and not only into the hands of owners, shareholders or absentee speculators).
See more at Peer Production License - P2P Foundation and Copyfarleft - P2P Foundation .
EDIT: I just want to add my position the points above: I personally think that if I want to contribute to a different world I need to publish my creative work and software under a licence that prevents the closure of the commons, a licence that prevents exploitation of workers for commercial exploitation. Not attaching a licence to my work/software means (posibily) criminalizing users of my work. Putting it in a Public Domain or BSD licences or CC-BY (or to a lesser extent CC-BY-SA) gives my material out in the wild for exploitation/extraction of value by capitalism. Using CC-BY-SA-NC is very close to ‘perfect’, but robs those in need to reuse and earn from derivation - with ‘those in need’ I mean “collectives in which the ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the value creators”. I really like ideas in the Peer Production Licence and want to use it on my work.
