Free Software Linux

So, how does an unknown anthropology professor from Kansas make a home movie on a “cheap computer” in his basement that beats out all the $3.6 million Super Bowl ads and transforms him into a Web 2.0 rock star? This story begins and ends with the free and open user-generated media-scape.

• Business

Copyright Criminals, which airs its documentaries on PBS, has an upcoming show on the rise of sampling in hip-hop music. While, the documentary focuses on copyright laws covering music it's not too difficult to apply lessons learned for other content including text found on web sites.

This is really quite interesting. It seems as though the UK government are starting, finally, to get the whole “Commons” thing.

There is this Government Department/Quango(?) called the Office of Public Sector Information (OSPI for short). Yep, I’ve never heard of them either. Not until I saw this tweet from Glyn Moody last night at any rate. The OSPI’s remit is (according to their website) as follows:

I'm a big fan of the Creative Commons movement. But it has a big problem: few people have heard of it according to a survey conducted on behalf of the UK's Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI).

In the survey, people were shown one of the standard CC logos (like the one at the foot of this page). Here's what they found:

75% of respondents did not recognise this image.

Lack of recognition was highest amongst the “general public” – 87%. And lowest amongst respondents from the OPSI website – 55% did not recognise the image.

The majority did not understand the meaning of the image. Understanding was highest amongst the OPSI website respondents – 35%.

As RMS emphasises again and again, at the heart of free software lies an ethical vision of sharing and mutual respect. Although open source blurs that vision somewhat thanks to the glasses of pragmatism that it wears, the basic idea is still there. And yet we talk relatively little about that ethical aspect, which is a pity, because it is both important and interesting.

Open Educational Resources are good for the economy (or at least, economizing). They are also good for students, teachers, and the environment. And they currently theme the most recent issue of Open Learning, The Journal of Open and Distance Learning (Volume 24, Issue 1).

I was happy to share my Hawaii vacation pictures under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, but it occurred to me that I may not have the legal right to do so for several of them.

Three were taken by my wife, but I’m pretty sure she’ll go along with me on the licensing choice.

Remember the short piece I posted about the Radio 4 programme “In Business” a couple of weeks ago? Well, very kindly, the programme’s editor has provided me with a transcript of programme to

please use as you wish, but it has not been checked for accuracy. Good luck.

I have just read and listened again and didn’t find anything glaring although I did fix one rather amusing typo: “Linux Colonel” to “Linux Kernel”. It was sent to me as a Microsoft .doc file. I opened it in OpenOffice.org and exported it as a PDF so it should be readable by virtually everyone.

Welcome the Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository

On this site you will find select broadcast quality footage that Al Jazeera has released under various Creative Commons licenses. Through Creative Commons licensing, you are able to legally share and reuse our footage.
What Al Jazeera understands is that you *want* people to copy and share your stuff: that's how you build influence. Locking content away is a sure method to *diminish* your role in the conversation. That's why most Western media companies are doomed to become irrelevant if they don't follow Al Jazeera's lead.

I’m an avid R4 listener, it’s by far the best radio anywhere; apart from The Archers of course… “Eauw Neauw” (The Open Sourcerer dons asbestos suit).

Anyway, over on Laney’s Blog Iain highlighted the most recent edition of Radio 4’s “In Business” (IB) programme. I do listen to IB quite often but had missed this one, so thanks Iain for pointing it out.

In a post about the relicensing option from the GNU Free Documentation License to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, Richard Stallman writes:

If a wiki site exercises the relicensing option, that entails trusting Creative Commons rather than the Free Software Foundation regarding its future license changes. In theory one might consider this a matter of concern, but I think we can be confident that Creative Commons will follow its stated mission in the maintenance of its licenses. Millions of users trust Creative Commons for this, and I think we can do likewise.

Sounds like a strong endorsement from someone with demanding standards.

<SALES_PITCH>

Of course, no danger of any of this dangerous "21st century" openness cropping up here in the UK:

President-elect Obama has championed the creation of a more open, transparent, and participatory government. To that end, Change.gov adopted a new copyright policy this weekend. In an effort to create a vibrant and open public conversation about the Obama-Biden Transition Project, all website content now falls under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
(With thanks to Alan Lord for reminding me this deserves to be highlighted.)

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of the term “intellectual property”, and that I prefer the more technically correct term “intellectual monopolies”. Despite that, I strongly recommend a new book from someone who not only approves of the term “intellectual property”, but of its fundamental ideas. I do so, however, because this avowed fan also has serious reservations....
On Open Enterprise blog.

I was excited yesterday to hear about a new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. (Also mentioned in a Creative Commons blog post.)

I wrote below about the distinction between digital and analogue objects, but that was just a crude statement of the situation, which is in a state of flux. The distinction between digital and analogue is blurring thanks to rapid prototyping machines that can take digital representations of objects and turn them into physical things.

Once that happens, it becomes possible to apply all the usual open source methodology to analogue stuff - sharing designs, improving on them etc. One thing you need to do this is a repository of open designs; enter the wonderfully-named Thingiverse: