In lieu of today’s regular column, I’ve decided to present an edited transcript of a very informative interview of Nina Paley by Thomas Gideon of “The Commandline Podcast.” Paley has been doing a lot of interviews since her free-licensed release of “Sita Sings the Blues” and her subsequent work with QuestionCopyright.org (specifically her two “Minute Meme” animations: “Copying Is Not Theft” and “All Creative Work is Derivative”) — reading them all would be quite a bit of work. But this interview is possibly the best — covering all of the major issues she’s been talking about in what I thought was a very insightful way. So: kudos to Nina Paley and to her interviewer, Thomas Gideon, and I hope you find this text version interesting.

It can be hard to get paid for producing free-licensed works. Software represents a niche where a lot of exceptions can be found, but for aesthetic works, the problem is severe. This has spurred a lot of innovative ideas for better incentive systems. Along the way, though, the most obvious and simple solution has mostly been overlooked: just re-implement the traditional limited copyright idea in a way that makes sense for the 21st century. Here’s a simple solution that I call “FLOW-IT” for “Free Licensing Of Works — In Time,” which simply leverages existing Creative Commons licensing to do the job.

An increasing number of computer users are turning to online applications instead of ones on their desktop. It started with webmail and has moved to productivity/office tools. With the emergence of online applications that have no desktop equivalent, and mobile devices that are browsers in your pocket, things are looking up. But what about free software? If the software we are using is not run on the computer on our desk/lap/hand what does the licence matter? For some time now I’ve been reading predictions where the browser will be the computer. Does this future have space for free software?

Terry Hancock seemed to raise a few hackles when he presented case recently that “copyleft has no impact on project activity?!)”. I’m not certain why, because it seemed he was just asking a question really (you’ll note the question mark). In that piece he mentions the reasons developers choose a copyleft licence. As a — somewhat small-time — developer of free software this topic interests me. Terry made a few statements about why developers choose a copyleft licence as did Tony Mobily in his editorial for issue 20. So let me tell you why this developer chose (and continues to choose) a copyleft licence?

Recently, I collected some data from Sourceforge, hoping to find evidence for the importance of copyleft. But I found something surprising: although there’s plenty of evidence that many developers believe in the power of copyleft, the one measure I could derive of how much copyleft actually works showed that copyleft made no difference whatsoever! If true, this means a lot of free software’s social theory is wrong and many things will have to be re-thought.

A new conventional wisdom began to spring up around free software, led in part by theorists like Eric Raymond, who were interested in the economics of free software production. Much of this thought centered around service-based and other ancillary sales for supporting free software. Based on this kind of thinking, it’s fairly easy to imagine extending free licensing ideas to utilitarian works. But what about aesthetic works? The Creative Commons was established in 2002, largely to solve the kinds of licensing problems that aesthetic works might encounter, and it has been remarkably successful, pushing the envelope of even this newer wave of thought. Today, Creative Commons licensed works number in at least the tens of millions. And more than a quarter of those are using the free “Attribution” or “Attribution-ShareAlike” licenses.

Microsoft. Open-Source Certification. This is not an April Fools, apparently. According to various news feeds (this was brought to my attention from PCWorld, but YMMV as these stories are periodic) they will be submitting some of their “shared source” licenses to the OSI. This is genuinely fantastic news, as after years of FUDing us around, they finally admit that Open Source exists, is a good thing, non-cancerous, and something with which they want to get involved. It’s also very flattering, because since they’re submitting to the OSI it tells us that they acknowledge the term “Open Source” (and by its implication “Free Software”) and that its definition is vested and controlled. By someone else.

But now they’ve built the bridge, they need to know how to cross it. There’s a cultural divide that has been fostered through the years. So listen up Microsoft, this is your next step in allowing shared source to become compatible with FOSS licenses and - more importantly - its inherent ideals!

How does License Proliferation effect medical software and what can we do about it? How to choose a license for your medical software project? What are the implications for the medical FOSS community of various software licenses? This is intended to be a complete guide to free and open source software licensing for medical software. Please comment on how I can make it better.

Sharing medical software: FOSS licensing in medicine

According to Bruce Perens, discussion draft 3 of GPLv3 is due to be published on Wednesday March 28th:

Mylatest blog entry began with this paragraph:

Messing with MP3 files is, for some people, a synonym for illegal use of copyrighted music. Well, actually it’s not.

The reason I wrote that incipit remained unclear to many, that didn’t seeany link between this first phrase and the rest of the article. I therefore decided towrite a few blog entries on the subject. This time I’ll talk about theMP3 format in itself.

Robin Miller recently published a story on Newsforge about “Stan”[1], as an example of a situation that demonstrates proprietary software is a danger to business continuity. I found this story interesting since I think Mr. Miller came close to correctly identifying a core issue, which is that the proprietary software business model as it exists today both facilitates and encourages vendors to act in bad faith. However, it did not need to have been this way, and really comes down to misuse of licensing along with some deliberate abuse and exploitation of existing commercial law.