Day 6

Todays lecture was about Free Software and Creative Commons.

Proprietary software is different from free software, as you must pay for it up front and can not be changed from its original code. Free software on the other hand is free to use and distribute and you may change any details of the code, so long as you forward these change on free of charge for others to benefit from.

This idea came from Richard Stallman the founder of copyleft (copyright flipped over), and is the core concept of putting stuff on the internet for free. It is a legally binding contract that controls the use of free and open software, it is essentially protects people who invest time into making programs that are not used for commercial gain.

In the early days of computer programming people would share their software with others and encourage any feed back on these programs, until the dawn of companies like Microsoft said that proprietary software should be created as the best way to make money and to use that money to make better programs, faster.

There are other options though by going to http://www.fsf.org/ you can find more information on downloading free software.

We then watched a video of a speech given by Prof Lawrence Lessig at at TED conference. The video can be found at http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/187. Prof Lessig was discussing his ideas of The Creative Commons (CC), this is an interesting idea. Using the old ideas of Copyright, but tweaking it in a more communal aspect. It gives people the freedom of being able to use other peoples photos, music and information without being sued, as long as the use is within their guidelines of their contract. When you add your creative material to the web you can add a CC contract, and customize it to your own prerequisites. You can stipulate whether your photos are used for commercial or not. You can also say if someone uses your photos and makes them your own then they must also say the source of the photo and pass their modified work on for free if it contains your photos. This is a great way of getting your work out there yet allowing people to use it as well. To learn more you can go to http://creativecommons.org/.

The final topic that we talked about was The Electronic Frontier Foundation, http://www.eff.org/. Like the Creative Commons, the EFF is a non profit organisation. the organisation is concerned with making sure the internet stays open for people to have access to without being restricted by conglomerate interests.

I have not really heard of EFF or CC and never really used free software before. So todays lecture was interesting for me to learn more about these avenues, to know that you don't just have to accept what you're being told you what you to have as your software and what you can do with it.