| I think you've hit the nail on the head there. The formal licences of FOSS came not a moment too soon - many open source developers still don't understand them or the copyright law they interact with, but use them primarily out of habit and custom. A much smaller subset in the open source community do understand them, and continue to make minor variations to keep up with changing times (such as accounting for the growing risk to FOSS from software patents). 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. |