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by CuriousCosmic
834 days ago
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> The types of desires that motivate open-source developers are the same as those of creative people in other fields, including fields where the norms are to charge for your work and to not license it permissively. If programmers could somehow satisfy these desires without giving away their work for free, I believe most of the open-source developers would not be open-source developers. It is a means to an end. This seems to miss that those same creative people in other fields very commonly give away their work for free. It's basically one of the staple means to actually surviving as an artist. Digital artists and illustrators distribute their work for free and commonly allow it to be used free of charge for non commercial purposes. The same goes for musicians. Freely distributing your work is basically how you survive as an artist. It builds you a brand (a "style") and a community of fans who end up networking your works for you. That's the underlying strategy for getting commissions as a digital artist nowadays. The difference with open source software is that software developers tend to use formal licenses rather than informal "ask me first but I'll probably say okay" licenses. And of the licenses that open source devs tend to use, plenty of them use copyleft licenses that fill essentially the same "okay for non commercial" condition (but instead of com vs non-com it's closed vs open source). So I think the bigger question should be "Why don't more open source developers use copyleft licenses when possible?". That question probably highlights the bigger difference between software developers and other creatives. |
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Artists that I've spoken to (and I've spoken to many) don't tend to understand copyright either. The more naïve ones believe that copyright will protect them from plagiarism; of course it's not that simple in practice. Yet, the cultural norms among artists today go back centuries before computers existed, and before modern copyright laws too. That seems to make it much harder for 'open culture' licences like Creative Commons to get a foothold, although online sites like Flickr have certainly contributed to collecting a sizeable corpus of freely-licenced art.
If the concept of Free Software had been conceived after the widespread use of the World Wide Web rather than before it, I don't think that even the comparative openness of the Web would have been enough to make FOSS catch on.
To me, that begs the question: does FOSS actually need to exist? After all, art and music continues to survive and thrive without free licensing? But when I ponder that question, I'm glad FOSS does exist. We programmers don't, by and large, have to cope with record labels and licensing agencies taking successively larger cuts from the sale of our work, and those who program professionally tend to be compensated considerably more generously than our counterparts in the creative arts.
Most importantly: we FOSS developers are able to share our own work and take advantage of others' with complete certainty and legality. No 'grey areas' about copying when the original author or artist goes AWOL (it's actually not a grey area; it's simply prohibited). No 'non-commercial use only' causing legal headaches for non-profit and charitable ventures. No Digital Rights Management - I don't need to explain that relief here!
So all in all, I get what the blog post's author is trying to say, but I think he's just taking the joy of FOSS for granted. Programming would be a much more competitive, less friendly world if it were exclusively proprietary and commercial, and would be exploited more - not less - if it were as ad-hoc and improvised an industry as in the creative arts.