[p2p-research] discussing openness

[Michel Bauwens]

from the blog comments:

*JohnnyB*

*a good point !*

*trying to prevent ideology – try openness and try again – don’t follow
priests of openness*

David Wiley’s point “content different from software” is worth to be
discusssed:
*music* for instance is full of quotations – there are musician being able
to make 10 quotations in 10 seconds of improvisation
music is performance – cannot be copied

elements of a *short story* or *novel* can be “quoted” (or “stolen”),
the point is: is the original better, or the remake?
is the idea or the plot more important than the elaboration?

if the remake is accompanied by an expensive marketing campaign to let
forget, that it’s based on something …

the key of the term opennness is
is it transparent, that someone tried a remake or not?

*softworkers* can copy pieces of code, they may have access to
or they gather key ideas from a given, available working software
or reinvent independently

no one can judge, whether an implementation is based on a stolen idea
(inside knowledge of a design or implementation) or if somebody invented
independently

but softworkers must not open their sources
there are more ways of openness



*Rob Myers*

Wiley once again demonstrates how “open” allows people to confuse themselves
and others. We don’t praise non-free works for being free because they are
not free. That is simple to explain and understand (and disagree with if one
wishes to).

“why aren’t we praising that?

For much the same reason we don’t praise employers who almost pay their
workers a living wage, musicians who almost perform at concerts, lawyers who
almost win cases and bloggers who almost make a coherent argument for doing
the things that they have not done. They haven’t done what they want the
kudos for achieving. It would be dishonest and counter-productive to pretend
that they have in the name of-what? Popularity? Coolness?

“Excluding people from the club” is an emotive plea but it doesn’t hide the
fact that it is a call to abandon the very principles it claims to be trying
to further. People who wish to destroy, undermine or free-ride on what you
are working towards are not your friends. It is the free culture equivalent
of greenwashing.

Wiley’s more interesting question is why standards applied to software
should be applied to cultural works. I’ve posted about this but the quick
version is that software and cultural works should all subject to free
speech, they are all copyrightable texts, copyright is a restriction on free
speech, and copyleft is the most effective way of neutralizing that
restriction for everyone.


-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20100716/0f6f76de/attachment.html>