Open Source Culture

The culture of sharing. A word for the new CreativeEconomy. Originates from the philosophy mercilessly fought for by RichardStallman and FreeSoftware.

ExtremeProgramming for OpenSourceCulture:

Make HackerSpace. Those who don't code, can help with project documentation, web pages.

http://readwrite.com/2013/05/15/open-source-is-old-school-says-the-github-generation

"For years, the software industry has been trending away from so-called 'copyleft' licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL) and toward permissive, Apache-style licensing. Given the rising importance of developers, this isn't surprising: developers just want to get work done without being bogged down by license requirements. It's perhaps not surprising, therefore, that permissive Apache licensing may simply be a way station on the road to no licensing at all."

Discuss.

The "industry" never tended towards copyleft, so it never trended away from it. The trend towards copyleft was primarily from the hackers of Open Source Culture and secondarily from the hackers of industry.

[Odd that the author appears to equate "open source" with "licensed in some fashion", but I suppose that's intended to construct a controversial article title in hopes of drawing traffic. It's true that most developers couldn't care less about licensing, and indeed it makes as much sense to license code as it does to license mathematical formulae. Expect a future in which "software" is always unlicensed open source and worth nothing in and of itself; value will come from advertising revenue, support/training/consulting/customization, and/or from subscription fees to access running software and/or the content it maintains.]

I think this has happened only because major software projects have been forming a "domain of protection" for the rest. Linux, for example, licensed and therefore protected under the GnuPublicLicense, has been a major force in forming such a domain. Otherwise, no-one really cares, because they haven't been part of the battle for FreeSoftware. By posting their code online, they are de facto making it OpenSource and that's "good enough" as far as they're concerned. But what happens if/when they make something great and it gets incorporated, without attribution, into commercial software, making the author's version irrelevant? Oops.

Most people are simply not apprised of the issues that rms has fought for.

CategoryOpenSource