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Free Culture and Copyleft: A social movements perspective
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| The increasing complexity of the intellectual property landscape will
| eventually come to a breaking point; legal cases involving copyright are
| notoriously expensive and difficult to settle, and the new profusion of
| alternative licensing options serves to further complicate the situation,
| despite the relative clarity of the CC licenses themselves. And these
| licenses have been adopted in an economically significant fashion. An amicus
| brief submitted for a recent federal appeals court decision pointed out that
| millions of works have been released under copyleft licenses, affecting such
| organizations as MIT, IBM, Wikipedia, numerous free software projects and
| many businesses; upholding a lower court decision that threatened copyleft
| enforceability would therefore be enormously disruptive.
`----
http://www.anikarenina.com/2008/11/21/free-culture-and-copyleft-a-social-movements-perspective/
Software as a subversive activity: The making of a Linux geek
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| The freedom part refers to open source. Source code is the sequence of
| commands that the über-über geeks write in programming languages. You then
| take a program called a compiler to convert the source code into
| an “executable” program--the 1s and 0s that the machine understands. In the
| Microsoft mindset, a purchaser gets the compiled program but the source code
| is a closely guarded proprietary secret. You get the software they wrote, use
| it the way they say, you wait for them to patch the bugs. In Linux world, the
| source code is open for everybody to see, adapt, and maybe improve. Whenever
| you're proofreading anything, extra sets of eyeballs means more chances
| someone will see the mistake.
`----
http://jdeeth.blogspot.com/2008/11/making-of-linux-geek.html
Recent:
On the Culture of Free Software: Interview with Christopher Kelty
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| Free Software provides a radical form of openness which is, perhaps, a very
| American way of constituting a public (suspicious of the state and
| corporations, obsessed with ideas of balance and fairness, and a weird mix of
| individualism and populism). The question I think it raises is whether, as a
| politics it has a content. Free Software as it exists has an insanely refined
| focus on form over political content (and this is the source of the suspicion
| about the dominance of the technical). But the question is: is this focus on
| form itself a particular kind of political content? At some level yes, but it
| is one that is open to, and maybe even encourages people to challenge it. It
| is a way of saying: if this is a (for instance) “libertarian” form, it is one
| that you are allowed to change — so make it less libertarian if you believe
| that will make it better. It says nothing, however, about whether people will
| have the power to do that, which is its weakest feature, its inability to
| incorporate the concrete fact that history has led us to this point.
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http://transition.turbulence.org/blog/2008/08/25/on-the-culture-of-free-software/
How world-changing are the culture and politics of free software?
,----[ Quote ]
| Free Software provides a radical form of openness which is, perhaps, a very
| American way of constituting a public (suspicious of the state and
| corporations, obsessed with ideas of balance and fairness, and a weird mix of
| individualism and populism). The question I think it raises is whether, as a
| politics it has a content. Free Software as it exists has an insanely refined
| focus on form over political content (and this is the source of the suspicion
| about the dominance of the technical). But the question is: is this focus on
| form itself a particular kind of political content? At some level yes, but it
| is one that is open to, and maybe even encourages people to challenge it. It
| is a way of saying: if this is a (for instance) “libertarian” form, it is one
| that you are allowed to change–so make it less libertarian if you believe
| that will make it better. It says nothing, however, about whether people will
| have the power to do that, which is its weakest feature, its inability to
| incorporate the concrete fact that history has led us to this point.”
`----
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/how-world-changing-are-the-culture-and-politics-of-free-software/2008/08/23
Free Software movement fights to keep internet freedom in Brazil
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| A proposed new law that restricts the freedom internet use in Brazil has
| already passed the Senate and is dangerously close to going on the books. The
| law, created by Senator Azeredo PSDB, restricts things like open wifi
| networks, forces ISP’s to keep user information for 3 years and gives ISP’s
| the ‘green light’ to open and look at packages coming from P2P user’s
| connection to check for copyright violations, and the list goes on and on.
|
| [...]
|
| It is quite of a big surprise to see such law coming from a government that
| has defended the use of Free Software, supported the Creative Commons license
| inside of its Ministry of Culture and promoted initiatives of digital
| inclusion and knowledge sharing. Hopefully, the proposed legislation will be
| blocked and internet users from Brazil will not have to be worry about being
| monitored by packet sniffing by ISP’s. Otherwise, Brazil will become one of
| the biggest users of TOR, a free software that provides anonymity online.
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http://news.northxsouth.com/2008/08/18/free-software-movement-fights-to-keep-internet-freedom-in-brazil/
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