Marcus Bornfreund

Creative Commons Canada

Open Source 101: Introduction to collaboration

Information

Information \In`for*ma"tion\

1. The act of informing, or communicating

knowledge or intelligence.

- Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.

- Stewart Brand, “In The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT” (Viking Penguin: 1987) at 202.

Information wants to be expensive

Exclusive possession

Information wants to be free

Universal possession

Regulating the tension

Intellectual property law

a set of rules that aims to balance the interests of creators in being rewarded for producing creative works against the interests of society in enjoyment of them.

Creativity as the Chicken.

Copyright

protects the manner in which an idea is expressed

art

Protected works

literary, dramatic, musical, artistic

art

Computer programs are literary works.

All Rights Reserved

©

Bundle of rights

produce, copy, distribute, perform, display, rent...

Creativity as the Egg.

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

- Sir Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke (1676)

A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two.

- George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Dwarfs on the shoulders of giants see further than the giants themselves.

- Stella Didacus, Eximii verbi divini CONCIONATORIS ORDINNIS MINORUM Regularis Observantiae (1622)

A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself.

- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.

- John of Salisbury, Metalogicon (1159)

We are like dwarfs standing (or sitting) upon the shoulders of giants, and so able to see more and see farther than the ancients.

- Bernard of Chartes (circa 1130)

Creativity builds on the past.

For computer programs, the power of peer-production is only fully realized when the source code is freely-accessible.

The Open Source Way

The basic idea behind applying the open source methodology to computer programs is very simple. When people can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a particular program, the program evolves. People improve it; people adapt it; people fix bugs.

The peer-production model is authorized through the use of an open source copyright licence.

The Open Source Definition

1.	Royalty-free redistribution (including source code); and

2.	Modification and derivative works allowed.

www.opensource.org

OSCAR

Open Source Consortium for Advanced Research

www.opensourcelaw.ca

You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them.

- Ursula Kroeber LeGuin

For more information, please contact

Marcus Bornfreund

marcus@law-share.net

www.creativecommons.ca

If I had more time I would explain the difference between FREE SOFTWARE and OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE though both require their source code to be made freely available. However, for the purpose of this lecture it is sufficient to understand that OPEN SOURCE simply encourages developers to give other developers access to their source code in the pursuit of INNOVATION.

From a practical perspective, what is important is that the source code is shared amongst the community so that it can scrutinized by interested parties, tested, debugged, improved upon and ultimately evolved into more robust and valuable code . It is for these reasons that open source software is often of higher quality than its proprietary counterpart and perhaps this model will dominate should the economy undergo the necessary reformation to support it.

PowerPoint Presentation

2005-06-15T21:20:14