open source code, copyright & culture [is52026b social computing - week 5]

8/3/2019 Open Source Code, Copyright & Culture [IS52026B Social computing - week 5]

1/19

IS52026 Social ComputingWeek 5: open source code, copyright & culture

dan mcquillan

Collaboration goes back to the birth of the internet.researchers with access to Advanced ResearchProjects Agency Network (ARPANET) used aprocess called Request for Comments to developtelecommunication network protocols. Thiscollaborative process of the 1960s led to the birth ofthe Internet in 1969.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

In United States vs. IBM, filed January 17, 1969, thegovernment charged that bundled software wasanticompetitive.[8]I

n 1980 copyright law was extended to computerprograms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software


2/19

By Gisle Hannemyr - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

In 1983, Richard Stallman, longtime member of the hackercommunity at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,

announced the GNU project...He developed a freesoftware definition and the concept of "copyleft",designed to ensure software freedom for all.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

Because of a fairly complicated controversy (whose detailsneed not concern us here but in which Stallman was

accused of illegally copying source code) the legal issuesconcerning patents, copyrights, and public domain firstand palpably became clear to software developers By1989, Stallman had crafted a legal framework for FreeSoftware to prevent the type of controversy that haderupted over his first Free Software program fromrecurring, and to add a layer of transparency, control, andaccountability for Free Software.

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/uploads/005/984/Coleman-Code-is-Speech.pdf


3/19

http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/04/apache-web-server-hit-a-home-run-in-2010/

Apache went from hosting 109 million websites in2009, to almost 152 million by the end of 2010.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/04/apache-web-server-hit-a-home-run-in-2010/


4/19

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/plush/288e/

Linus Torvalds, who wanted to rewrite the proprietaryUNIX operating system for the personal computer,initiated the Linux kernel project in 1991 as ahobbyist pursuit and eventually used an electronicmailing list to request feedback.


Linux. coincided with mass collaboration affordancesof internet. Open source on the Internet beganwhen the Internet was relatively primitive, withsoftware distributed via UUCP, Usenet, and irc, andgopher. Linux, for example, was first widelydistributed by posts to comp.os.linux on the Usenet,which is also where its development was

discussed. Linux became the archetype fororganized open source development, in general.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source


5/19

http://tuxweet.linux.org.tr/view/post:89513

in 1993 Ian Murdock, a computer science student,combined Torvalds kernel with some of theGNU/FSF software tools to create a fully functional

operating system distribution of Linux called Debian.http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/uploads/005/98

4/Coleman-Code-is-Speech.pdf


6/19

by inju CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

"The essay's central thesis is Raymond's propositionthat "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"(which he terms Linus' Law)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

pragmatic justifications...

This differentiation between free beer and freespeech is the clearest enunciation

of what, to these developers, are the core meaningsof freeexpression,

learning, and modification. Freedom is understoodforemost to be about personal

control and autonomous production and decidedly

not about commodity consumptionor possessive individualismhttp://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/uploads/005/98



7/19

by codepo8 (CC BY 2.0)

In May 2003, Munich's city council resolved tomigrate municipal workstations to Linux and opensource. Towards this goal, the city developed itsown LiMux client and WollMux, a template systemfor OpenOffice.Munich's LiMux project hasreached its halfway point. Half of the City's PCstations that are to be migrated to Linux have nowswitched to the LiMux client. In the past three

months alone, 1,000 PCs have migrated, and theLiMux project directors say that at this speed theproject is on schedule. A total of 12,000 to 15,000PC workstations used by city officials in Munich areto switch to Linux and open source software.

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/LiMux-celebrates-halfway-point-in-Munich-1228637.html


8/19

by Lmarino (CC BY-NC 2.0)

But I've always felt frustrated that most peopledon't ... didn't have write access. And wikis andblogs are two areas where suddenly two sort ofgenres of online information suddenly allow peopleto edit, and they're very widely picked up, andpeople are very excited about them.

And I think that really for me reinforces the idea that

people need to be creative. They want to be able torecord what they think. They want to be able to, ifthey see something wrong go and fix it. TBLhttp://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html


9/19

Language. Tranlsation. Rendering, spell checking...

Multikulti.

Show http://mio.gov.mk/?q=node/2280


10/19

http://evolution-control.com/sounds/gunderphonic/

legend has it that the first true "mashup" as it isunderstood today was a 1994 track by theEvolution Control Committee that combined aPublic Enemy rap over a Herb Albert instrumental

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1460/1375

The Evolution Control Committee- Rebel Without A

Pausehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcJTioKULCQ

Creativity and innovation based on reuse,adaptation...

Amen break

1969 b-sidesampler 1980's hip-hophttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac


11/19

The rise of open-source culture in the 20th centuryresulted from a growing tension between creativepractices that involve appropriation, and thereforerequire access to content that is often copyrighted,and increasingly restrictive intellectual propertylaws and policies governing access to copyrightedcontent. The two main ways in which intellectualproperty laws became more restrictive in the 20th

century were extensions to the term of copyright(particularly in the United States) and penalties,such as those articulated in the Digital MillenniumCopyright Act (DMCA), placed on attempts tocircumvent anti-piracy technologies.[43]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

Fan cultureStar Wars Episode I: The Phantom Edithttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzC-KdR5UHM


12/19

The other great aspect of Dirk's presentation was theimage he conjoured up of a titanic clash betweentwo legal regimes, namely Intellectual PropertyRights versus Human Rights. As he put it, we needto decide between "Copyright/trademark protectionas a principle and freedom of expression as anexception or Freedom of expression as a principleand copyright/trademark protection as exceptions".

http://www.internetartizans.co.uk/copyright-versus-campaigning


13/19

Copyright wars. copyright absolutism. CopyFight.intellectual property expansionism. the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which became US law in

1998, as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.


14/19

by pablokdc (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

* Attribution (CC BY)* Attribution Share Alike (CC BY-SA)

* Attribution No Derivatives (CC BY-ND)* Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC)* Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA)* Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)

EXERCISE: WHAT FEATURES WOULD YOINCLUDE IN A SHARING LICENSE

Creative Commons licenses consist of four majorcondition modules: Attribution (BY), requiringattribution to the original author; Share Alike (SA),allowing derivative works under the same or asimilar license (later or jurisdiction version); Non-

Commercial (NC), requiring the work is not used forcommercial purposes; and No Derivative Works(ND), allowing only the original work, withoutderivatives.

Generally, many critics erroneously view CreativeCommons as a replacement of Copyright, whereas

in reality it is a standardized, copyright basedsolution for those cases where re-use and re-mixing is desired under specific conditions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons


15/19

David Berry and Giles Moss have credited CreativeCommons with generating interest in the issue ofintellectual property and contributing to the re-thinking of the role of the "commons" in the"information age"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons

Developers construct new legal meanings by

challenging the ideaof software as property and by crafting new free

speech theories to defend the ideaof software as speech.http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/uploads/005/98



16/19

Using Debian, the largest Free Software project inthe world, as my primary ethnographic example, Isuggest that these F/OSS projects have served likean informal law education, transformingtechnologists into informal legal scholars

who are experts in the legal technicalities of F/OSSas well as proficient in the current workings ofintellectual property law.



17/19

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/LifeTrac

Open source tractorhttp://opensourceecology.org/

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/LifeTrac


18/19

by rob_knight (CC BY-SA 2.0)

the tricky balance between creativity, culture, and the relationshipbetween audiences and creators. These have always been hard

subjects, and the Internet has made them harder still, becausethe thing that triggers copyright rules copying is an intrinsicpart of the functioning of the Internet and computers. Theresreally no such thing as loading a web-page you make a copyof it. Theres really no such thing as reading a file off a hard-drive you copy it into memory.

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2011/11/cory-doctorow-its-time-to-stop-talking-about-copyright

snoops on everything to find the bad stuff - but net isn't just

entertainment, it's everything else (work, socialization, health,education, access to tools and ideas, freedom of speech,assembly and the press, as well as the conduit to political andcivic engagement)

"There is no copyright policy, only Internet policy; there is noInternet policy, only policy"

http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2011/11/cory-doctorow-its-

time-to-stop-talking-about-copyright

"There is no copyright policy, only Internet policy; there is noInternet policy, only policy" @doctorow http://bit.ly/vUas9R


19/19

By 3arabawy (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

@telecomix: Free as in People

@alaa

Free as in people

open source code, copyright & culture [is52026b social computing - week 5]

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