
Toward a new self-definition for open source - blasdel
http://blog.ianbicking.org/2009/09/10/a-new-self-definition-for-foss/
======
ZeroGravitas
Wow. Epic.

Even if you're put off by the software licence politics stuff at the start,
hang on for the personal reflections on the craft and culture of open source
software development.

------
kiba
My software political philosophy is built on a wider and bigger framework
called individualist anarchism and libertarianism.

Now, each ethical system, with the exception of maybe nilhists, have its own
set of duties that are owned to other person(s).

So what is the duty of my ethical system? I think it can be sumed up as
"first, do no harm". Then it perscribe protection from interferences as well
protection of the individual from corecison and whatever forces that have
decided for whatever reason to attack that person(s), whether it is for the
"benefit" of the group or just plain tranny.

In the libertarian ethical system, you will not take somebody's property for
the sake of welfare or other reason without consent. You also have freedom of
contract and the right to bear arm, especially when somebody decided to
violates property right and start killing/murdering/looting/taxing. You have
the freedom to conduct trade, and compete on the free market, as well give
charity to others.

However, you don't have the right to internet, free education, free roads, or
health care in exchange for protection from stealing and theft(which is
sometime known as taxation).

As for what this mean in practice in free software for me?(I know I skiped a
lot of stuff)

1\. Copyright is pretty much a violation of property right.

2\. Consumers owned software that they brought by default.

3\. It doesn't matter if I couldn't compete with "pirates", I don't have a
right to make a living.

4\. Economic intervention is wrong. It doesn't matter if copyright give 50000%
increase in productivity.

So this is why I want to move toward copyfree free software to the best extent
as possible. I wish I could license all my stuff under the public domain, but
people licensed their stuff under MIT or GPL. I want to use their stuff, so I
licensed similiarity.

Old code are still licensed under too much of a restrictive licenses.

Still, I have some plan to do public domain software in the future.

~~~
rwolf
Creative Commons has a fun license called CC0 that you might enjoy:
<http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0>

While I'm not comfortable with the idea myself (I'm a big fan of attribution),
it certainly looks attractive.

~~~
kiba
Yes, I am very aware of Creative Common Zero and I am going to try to use it
in latest release of my game.

Attribution has worked very well for me in the sense that all of my fears were
unfounded. It only seem that copycats only copy when you're popular. At that
stage, copycats are no problem at all.

Mostly, I am worried about frauds prepretuating lies that they're the authors
of my work but they seem to be the rare type.

