It depends of course, but overall Greenbaum’s message for proprietary hardware is exactly the same as innumerable commentators’ messages for proprietary software:

• If you use any GPL work, be extremely careful to isolate that use in ways that minimize the chances one could successfully claim your larger work triggers GPL requirements;
• Excluding GPL work would be easier; if you want to incorporate open source works, consider only LGPL (I don’t understand why Greenbaum didn’t mention permissive licenses, but typically they’d be encouraged here).

Greenbaum concludes:

The semiconductor industry has been moving further toward the use of independently developed cores to speed the creation of new devices and products. However, the need for robustly maintained and supported cores and the absence of clear rules and licenses appropriate for the industry’s structure and practice have stymied the development of an open source ecosystem, which might otherwise have been a natural outgrowth of the use of independently developed cores. The development of a context-specific open source license may be the simplest way to clarify the applicable legal rules and encourage the commercial use of open source cores.

That’s something like what John Ackermann wanted to show more generally for hardware designs in a paper I’ve written about before. Each leaves me unconvinced:

• If one wants copyleft terms, whether to protect a community or proprietary licensing revenue, use the GPL, which gives you plenty of room to aggressively enforce as and if you wish;
• If you don’t want copyleft terms, use a permissive license such as the Apache License 2.0 (some people understand this but still think version tweaked for hardware is necessary; I’m skeptical of that too).

Greenbaum does mention Ackermann’s paper and TAPR license and other “open hardware” licenses I previously discussed in a footnote:

While “open hardware” licenses do exist, they do not take account of many of the complexities of the semiconductor device manufacturing process. For example, the TAPR Open Hardware License does not address the use of technology libraries, the incorporation of soft cores in a device design, or the use of independent contractors for part s of the design
process.

I think this highlights a difference of perspective. “Open hardware” people inclined toward copyleft want licenses which even more clearly than the GPL impose copyleft obligations on entities that build on copylefted designs. Greenbaum doesn’t even sketch what a license he’d consider appropriate for the industry would look like, but I’m doubtful that a license tailored to enabling some open collaboration but protecting revenues in industry-specific ways would be considered free or open by many people, or be used much.

I suspect the reason open hardware has only begun taking off recently (and will be huge soon) and open semiconductor design not yet (though for both broad and narrow categories people have been working on it for well over a decade) has almost nothing to do with the applicability of widely used licenses (which are far from ideal even for software, but network effects rule) and everything to do with design and production technologies that make peer production a useful addition.

Although I think the conclusion is weak (or perhaps merely begs for a follow-up explaining the case), Greenbaum’s paper is well worth reading, in particular section VI. Distribution of Physical Devices, which makes the case the GPL applies to such based on copyright, contract, and copyright-like restrictions and patent. These are all really important issues for info/innovation/commons governance to grapple with going forward. My hope is that existing license stewards take this to heart (e.g., do serious investigations of how GPLv3+ and Apache 2.0 can be best used for designs, and take what is learned and what the relevant communities say when in the fullness of time the next versions of those licenses are developed; the best contribution Creative Commons can probably make is to increase compatibility with software licenses and disrecommend direct use of CC licenses for designs as it has done for software) and that newer communities not operate in an isolated manner when it comes to commons governance.

Today’s Boing Boing post (note their Day Against DRM post from last week) says a library in Colorado is:

buying eBooks directly from publishers and hosting them on its own platform. That platform is based on the purchase of content at discount; owning—not leasing—a copy of the file; the application of industry-standard DRM on the library’s files; multiple purchases based on demand; and a “click to buy” feature.

I think that’s exactly what Open Library is doing (maybe excepting “click to buy”; not sure what happened to “vending” mentioned when BookServer was announced). A letter to publishers from the library is fairly similar to the Internet Archive’s plea of a few days ago. Exceprt:

• We will attach DRM when you want it. Again, the Adobe Content Server requires us to receive the file in the ePub format. If the file is “Creative Commons” and you do not require DRM, then we can offer it as a free download to as many people as want it. DRM is the default.
• We will promote the title. Over 80% of our adult checkouts (and we checked out over 8.2 million items last year) are driven by displays. We will present e-content data (covers and descriptions) on large touch screens, computer catalogs, and a mobile application. These displays may be “built” by staff for special promotions (Westerns, Romances, Travel, etc.), automatically on the basis of use (highlighting popular titles), and automatically through a recommendation engine based on customer use and community reviews.
• We will promote your company. See a sample press release, attached.

I did not realize libraries were so much like retail (see “driven by displays”). Disturbing, but mostly off-topic.

The letter lists two concerns, both financial. Now: give libraries discounts. Future: allow them to sell used copies. DRM is not a concern now, nor for the future. As I said a couple days ago, I appreciate the rationale for making such a deal. Librarian (and Wikimedian, etc) Phoebe Ayers explained it well almost exactly two years ago: benefit patrons (now). Ok. But this seems to me to fit what ought to be a canonical definition of non-visionary action: choosing to climb a local maximum which will be hard to climb down from, with higher peaks in full view. Sure, the trails are not known, but must exist. This “vision” aspect is one reason Internet Archive’s use of DRM is more puzzling than local libraries’ use.

Regarding “owning—not leasing—a copy of the file”, I now appreciate more a small part of the Internet Archive’s recent plea:

re-format for enduring access, and long term preservation

Are libraries actually getting books from publishers in formats ideal for these tasks? I doubt it, but if they are, that’s a very significant plus.

I dimly recall source code escrow being a hot topic in software around 25 years ago. (At which time I was reading industry rags…at my local library.) I don’t think it has been a hot topic for a long time, and I’d guess because the ability to run the software without a license manager, and to inspect, fix, and share the software right now, on demand, rather than as a failsafe mechanism, is a much, much better solution. Good thing lots of people and institutions over the last decades demanded the better solution.

Copyrestriciton is not at all a right to copy a work, but a right to persecute others who distribute, perform, etc, a work. Although it is often said that a work is protected by copyrestriction, this is strictly not true. A work is protected through the existence of lots of copies and lots of curators. The same is true for information about a work, i.e., metadata, e.g., provenance. Copyrestriction is an attack on the safety of a work. Instead, copyrestriction protects the revenue and control of whoever holds copyrestriction on a work. In some cases, some elements of control remain with a work’s immediate author, even if they no longer hold copyrestriction: so-called moral rights.

Copyrestriction has become inexorably more restrictive. Technology has made it increasingly difficult for copyrestriction holders and their agents to actually restrict others’ copying and related activity. Neither trend has to give. Neither abolition nor police state in service of copyrestriction scenarios are likely in the near future. Nor is the strength of copyrestricition the only dimension to consider.

Free and open source software has demonstrated the ethical and practical value of the opposite of copyrestriction, which is not its absence, but regulation mandating the sharing of copies, specifically in forms suitable for inspection and improvement. This regulation most famously occurs in the form of source-requiring copyleft, e.g., the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allows copyrestriction holders to use copyrestriction to force others to share works based on GPL’d works in their preferred form for modification, e.g., source code for software. However, this regulation occurs through other means as well, e.g., communities and projects refusing to curate and distribute works not available in source form, funders mandating source release, and consumers refusing to buy works not available in source form. Pro-sharing regulation (using the term “regulation” maximally broadly to include government, market, and others; some will disbelieve in the efficacy or ethics of one or more, but realistically a mix will occur) could become part of many policies. If it does not, society will be put at great risk by relying in security through obscurity, and lose many opportunities to scrutinize, learn about, and improve society’s digital infrastructure and the computing devices individuals rely on to live their lives, and to live, period.

Information sharing, and regulation promoting and protecting the same, also ought play a large role in the future of science. Science, as well as required information disclosure in many contexts, long precedes free and open source software. The last has only put a finer point on pro-sharing regulation in relation to copyrestriction, since the most relevant works (mainly software) are directly subject to both. But the extent to which pro-sharing regulation becomes a prominent feature of information governance, and more narrowly, the extent to which people have software freedom, will depend mostly on the competitive success of projects that reveal or mandate revelation of source, the success of pro-sharing advocates in making the case that pro-sharing regulation is socially desirable, and their success in getting pro-sharing regulation enacted and enforced (again, whether in customer and funding agreements, government regulation, community constitutions, or other) much more so than copyrestriction-based enforcement of the GPL and similar. But it is possible that the GPL is setting an important precedent for pro-sharing regulation, even though the pro-sharing outcome is conceptually orthogonal to copyrestriction.

Returning to copyrestriction itself, if neither abolition nor totalism are imminent, will humanity muddle through? How? What might be done to reduce the harm of copyrestriction? This requires a brief review of the forces that have resulted in the current muddle, and whether we should expect any to change significantly, or foresee any new forces that will significantly impact copyrestriction.

Technology (itself, not the industry as an iterest group) is often assumed to be making copyrestriction enforcement harder and driving demands for for harsher restrictions. In detail, that’s certainly true, but for centuries copyrestriciton has been resilient to technical changes that make copying ever easier. Copying will continue to get easier. In particular the “all culture on a thumb drive” (for some very limited definition of “all”) approaches, or is here if you only care about a few hundred feature length films, or are willing to use portable hard drive and only care about a few thousand films (or much larger numbers of books and songs). But steadily more efficient copying isn’t going to destroy copyrestriction sector revenue. More efficient copying may be necessary to maintain current levels of unauthorized sharing, given steady improvement in authorized availability of content industry controlled works, and little effort to make unauthorized sharing easy and worthwhile for most people (thanks largely to suppression of anyone who tries, and media management not being an easy problem). Also, most collection from businesses and other organizations has not and will probably not become much more difficult due to easier copying.

National governments are the most powerful entities in this list, and the biggest wildcards. Although most of the time they act roughly as administrators or follow the cue of more powerful national governments, copyrestriction laws and enforcement are ultimately in their courts. As industries that could gain from copyrestriction grow in developing nations, those national governments could take on leadership of increasing restriction and enforcement, and with less concern for civil liberties, could have few barriers. At the same time, some developing nations could decide they’ve had enough of copyrestriction’s inequality promotion. Wealthy national governments could react to these developments in any number of ways. Trade wars seem very plausible, actual war prompted by a copyrestriction or related dispute not unimaginable. Nations have fought stupid wars over many perceived economic threats.

The traditional copyrestriction industry is tiny relative to the global economy, and even the U.S. economy, but its concentration and cachet make it a very powerful lobbyist. It will grab all of the revenue and control it possibly can, and it isn’t fading away. As alluded to above, it could become much more powerful in currently developing nations. Generational change within the content industry should lead to companies in that industry better serving customers in a digital environment, including conceivably attenuating persecution of fans. But it is hard to see any internal change resulting in support for positive legal changes.

Artists have always served as exhibit one for the content industry, and have mostly served as willing exhibitions. This has been highly effective, and every category genuflects to the need for artists to be paid, and generally assumes that copyrestriction is mandatory to achieve this. Artists could cause problems for copyrestriction-based businesses and other organizations by demanding better treatment under the current system, but that would only effect the details of copyrestriction. Artists could significantly help reform if more were convinced of the goodness of reform and usefulness of speaking up. Neither seems very likely.

Other businesses, web companies most recently, oppose copyrestriction directions that would negatively impact their businesses in the short term. Their goal is not fundamental reform, but continuing whatever their current business is, preferably with increasing profits. Just the same as content industries. A fundamental feature of muddling through will be tests of various industries and companies to carve out and protect exceptions. And exploit copyrestriction whenever it suits them.

Administrators, ranging from lawyers to WIPO, though they work constantly to improve or exploit copyrestriciton, will not be the source of significant change.

Free and open source software and other constructed commons have already disrupted a number of categories, including server software and encyclopedias. This is highly significant for the future of copyrestriction, and more broadly, information governance, and a wildcard. Successful commons demonstrate feasibility and desirability of policy other than copyrestriction, help create a constituency for reducing copyrestriction and increasing pro-sharing policies, and diminish the constituency for copyrestriction by reducing the revenues and cultural centrality of restricted works and their controlling entities. How many additional sectors will opt-in freedom disrupt? How much and for how long will the cultural centrality of existing restricted works retard policy changes flowing from such disruptions?

Cultural change will affect the future of copyrestriction, but probably in detail only. As with technology change, copyrestriction has been incredibly resilient to tremendous cultural change over the last centuries.

Copyrestriction reformers (which includes people who would merely prevent additional restrictions, abolitionists, and those between and beyond, with a huge range of motivations and strategies among them) will certainly affect the future of copyrestriction. Will they only mitigate dystopian scenarios, or cause positive change? So far they have mostly failed, as the political economy of diffuse versus concentrated interests would predict. Whether reformers succeed going forward will depend on how central and compelling they can make their socio-political cause, and thus swell their numbers and change society’s narrative around information governance — a wildcard.

Scholars contribute powerfully to society’s narrative over the long term, and constitute a separate wildcard. Much scholarship has moved from a property- and rights-based frame to a public policy frame, but this shift as yet is very shallow, and will remain so until a property- and rights-basis assumption is cut out from under today’s public policy veneer, and social scientists rather than lawyers dominate the conversation. This has occurred before. Over a century ago economists were deeply engaged in similar policy debates (mostly regarding patents, mostly contra). Battles were lost, and tragically economists lost interest, leaving the last century’s policy to be dominated by grabbers exploiting a narrative of rights, property, and intuitive theory about incentives as cover, with little exploration and explanation of public welfare to pierce that cover.

Each of the above determinants of the future of copyrestriction largely hinge on changing (beginning with engaging, in many cases) people’s minds, with partial exceptions for disruptive constructed commons and largely exogenous technology and culture change (partial as how these develop will be affected by copyrestriction policy and debate to some extent). Even those who cannot be expected to effect more than details as a class are worth engaging — much social welfare will be determined by details, under the safe assumption that society will muddle through rather than make fundamental changes.

I don’t know how to change or engage anyone’s mind, but close with considerations for those who might want to try:

• Make copyrestriction’s effect on wealth, income, and power inequality, across and within geographies, a central part of the debate.
• Investigate assumptions of beneficent origins of copyrestriction.
• Tolerate no infringement of intellectual freedom, nor that of any civil liberty, for the sake of copyrestriction.
• Do not assume optimality means “balance” nor that copyrestriction maximalism and public domain maximalism are the poles.
• Make pro-sharing, pro-transparency, pro-competition and anti-monopoly policies orthogonal to above dimension part of the debate.
• Investigate and celebrate the long-term policy impact of constructed commons such as free and open source software.
• Take into account market size, oversupply, network effects, non-pecuniary motivations, and the harmful effects of pecuniary motivations on creative work, when considering supply and quality of works.
• Do not grant that copyrestriction-based revenues are or have ever been the primary means of supporting creative work.
• Do not grant big budget movies as failsafe argument for copyrestriction; wonderful films will be produced without, and even if not, we will love whatever cultural forms exist and should be ashamed to accept any reduction of freedom for want of spectacle.
• Words are interesting and important but trivial next to substance. Replace all occurrences of “copyrestriction” with “copyright” as you see fit. There is no illusion concerning our referent.

This work takes part in the Future of Copyright Contest and is published under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Regarding security, malfunctions, etc., we need to demand use of proven secure protocols and source open to inspection, i.e, not play security through obscurity. Regarding space, planning for urbanity remade (largely, recovered) through autonomous vehicles needs to be the top urban planning priority.

The benefits will be so great that we should also think about how to speed adoption — the only disheartening news in Templeton’s post concerns a survey in which only 20% of car buyers would pay an additional $3,000 for a fully (if I understand correctly) self-driving car. How little respondents value their own time and lives, let alone others’! It’s time to start agitating for road owners to ban human drivers. Most road owners are governments, but not all — consider as an issue of public policy or consumer demand as you wish.

Won’t banning human drivers disadvantage poor people who can’t afford a self-driving car? Possibly very briefly, but on net I expect self-driving cars to have an egalitarian effect — they’ll make owning a vehicle at all unnecessary (a rental can be summoned on demand), reduce housing costs (of which parking is a big part), and allow the recovery of areas walled off and drowned out by highways.

Let’s ban human drivers from at least some roads by 2020. I suggest starting with San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley — because I live close to it! Admittedly a downtown area or certain lanes of a highway might be an easier start.

^*In theory it is usually preferable to increase prices rather than ban altogether. In this case, obvious mechanisms would include drastically increasing driver license fees and tolls for vehicles with human drivers. In practice, a ban may be more feasible.

• The first talk encouraged people to get up, and demonstrated some hand stretches. Although almost everyone knows sitting hunched up all day is harmful, almost everyone needs an occasional reminder. A mention at any conference is well worthwhile for the individuals and community in question.
• Plush is a POSIX shell server (in Haskell) with a web UI (Javascript; communication between them with JSON, session initiated with an unguessable URL), which already provides some nice context and control over display not available in a usual table, e.g., the output of each command is collapsible, pieces of the current path are clickable, and there are tooltips for each command argument.
• You currently have to register (no verification) to see anything, but GitStar is a GitHub clone built on Hails, a framework for hosting mutually untrusted web applications (eg project wiki and source browser in case of GitStar), at least with respect to access to each others’ data, which is controlled via “Labeled IO”, with labels specifying policy around data based on Information Flow Control, a subject I had not heard of. GitStar and Hails source is mirrored on GitHub. An initial research paper and promise of more at the bottom of a README.
• Visi is a language implemented in Haskell that seems somewhere between a spreadsheet and a traditional programming language read-eval-print-loop (ad hoc, immediate recalculation, but no grid). Spreadsheet programming is something I know almost nothing about, and ought to.
• Composable Pipes. For readers who care about such things, note author dissuaded from using GPL in linked thread.
• Something about typesafe reuse of types extending Agda’s typesystem. I understood very little (my fault).
• cabal branch will checkout source for any Haskell package with source repository annotations — source of the specific version you’re using, if annotation specifies source-repository this.
• A talk about Lift, a Scala web framework, mostly concerning the benefits of passing around a DOM representation rather than treating templates as blobs of text. I’m impressed by Lift, and played a bit with it a couple years ago, but was in no place to spend time to develop any real application.
• Implementations of Paxos and parallel builds.
• Interacting with DBUS (eg GNOME and KDE applications) from Haskell.
• Shelly, a library for shell scripting in Haskell. Side point made that scripting languages, including Ruby, find initial popularity through scripting by sysadmins, not developer frameworks — true to my experience.
• Visualizing n-gram relationships with SVG output.
• Translating simple art pieces in Forth to C.
• Pingwell is creating apps to bring pricing and other information to consumers when they can act on it, eg in a grocery store. I’m pretty sure this scenario has been imagined thousands of times over the past few decades, good that it will come to exist soon. The talk was mostly about using a Haskell computer vision library.

Other observations:

• Macbooks in majority, but lower proportion than usual — and many, perhaps a majority, of people with Macbooks seemed to be developing on Linux in a virtual machine.
• 100% male attendees, which is a bit disturbing, but I detected zero brogrammer vibe.
• The first day was hosted at Hacker Dojo, which I had heard of but never visited. I was surprised at how large and quiet it was. At least during the day, it seems dozens of people use as a coworking space.
• Web application development, Yesod in particular, is attracting more people to Haskell (I can’t find a reference, but recall that #haskell and/or /r/haskell watchers increased substantially on the day Yesod 1.0 was released). Newbie attendees (me included) leaning Haskell and Yesod further evidence.
• Lots of anguish and anguished cries about dependency hell.

Thanks to BayHac organizer Mark Lentczner (also Plush developer and haskell-patform release manager; watch his intro to Haskell video) for putting together such a well run and friendly event. I felt some trepidation about attending, knowing that almost everyone would be both smarter and more experienced than me, but everyone was helpful and patient. I’m glad I went.

A couple weeks ago I attended the Free Software Foundation’s annual conference, Libre Planet, held at UMass Boston a bit south of downtown. I enjoyed the event considerably, but can only give brief impressions of some of the sessions I saw.

John Sullivan, Matt Lee, Josh Gay started with a welcome and talk about some recent FSF campaigns. I think Sullivan said they exceeded their 2011 membership goal, which is great. Join. (But if I keep to my refutation schedule, I’m due to tell you why you shouldn’t join in less than 5 years.)

Rubén Rodríguez spoke about Trisquel, a distribution that removes non-free software and recommendations from Ubuntu (lagging those releases by about 5 months) and makes other changes its developers consider user-friendly, such as running GNOME 3 in fallback mode and some Web (an IceWeasel-like de-branded Firefox) privacy settings. I also saw a lightning talk from someone associated with ThinkPenguin, which sells computers pre-loaded with Trisquel.

Asheesh Laroia spoke about running events that attract and retain newcomers. You can read about OpenHatch (the organization he runs) events or see a more specific presentation he recently gave at PyCon with Jessica McKellar. The main point of humor in the talk concerned not telling potential developers to download a custom built VM to work with your software: it will take a long time, and often not work.

Joel Izlar’s talk was titled Digital Justice: How Technology and Free Software Can Build Communities and Help Close the Digital Divide about his work with Free IT Athens.

Alison Chaiken gave the most important talk of the conference, Why Cars need Free Software. I was impressed by how many manufacturers are using at least some free software in vehicles and distressed by the state of automotive security and proprietary vendors pitching security through obscurity. Like Appelbaum and Sandler, get Chaiken in front of as many people as possible.

Brett Smith gave an update on the FSF GPL compliance Lab, including mentioning MPL 2.0 and potential CC-BY-SA 4.0 compatibility with GPLv3 (both of which I’ve blogged about before), but the most interesting part of the talk concerned his participation in Trans-Pacific Partnership Stakeholder Forums; it sounded like software freedom concerns got a more welcome reception than expected.

ginger coons spoke about Libre Graphics Magazine, a graphic arts magazine produced entirely with free software. I subscribed.

Deb Nicholson gave a great, funny presentation on Community Organizing for Free Software Activists. If the topic weren’t free software, Nicholson could make a lot of money as a motivational speaker.

Evan Prodromou spoke on the Decentralized Social Web, using slides the same or very similar to his SXSW deck, which is well worth flipping through.

Eben Moglen’s talk was titled Free Software’s Future Amidst the Commercial Open Source Wars: How to Turn the Patent Disaster and Compliance Issues to Our Advantage, but I think I missed the how to part. Moglen also talked for awhile about IRS scrutiny of free software organization 501(c)(3) applications, vaguely hinting at a potential need to “re-evaluate how our infrastructure is organized” (paraphrase). I’ll have more to say about that, but in another post.

Chris Webber and I spoke about Creative Commons 4.0 licenses and free software/free culture cooperation. You can view our picture-only slides (odp; pdf; slideshare) but a recent interview with me and post about recent developments in MediaGoblin (Webber’s project) would be more informative and cover similar ground. We also pre-announced an exciting project that Webber will spam the world about tomorrow and sort of reciprocated for an award FSF granted Creative Commons three years ago — the GNU project won the Free Software Project for the Advancement of Free Culture Social Benefit Award 0, including the amount of 100BTC, which John Sullivan said would be used for the aforementioned exciting project.

Yukihiro ‘matz’ Matsumoto spoke on how Emacs changed his life, including introducing him to programming, free software, and influencing the design of Ruby.

Matthew Garrett spoke on Preserving user freedoms in the 21st century. Perhaps the most memorable observation he made concerned how much user modification of software occurs without adequate freedom (making the modifications painful), citing CyanogenMod.

I mostly missed the final presentations in order to catch up with people I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise, but note that Matsumoto won the annual Advancement of Free Software award, and GNU Health the Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit. Happy hacking!

Oakland, California, USA — 2012 April 1

Today, RichClowd pre-announces the launch of RichClowd.com, an exclusive “crowdfunding” service for the wealthy. Mass crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter have demonstrated a business model, but are held back by the high transaction costs of small funds and non-audacious projects proposed by under-capitalized creators. RichClowd will be open exclusively to funders and creators with already substantial access to capital.

The wealthy can fund and create audacious projects without joining together, but mass crowdfunding points to creative, marketing, networking, and status benefits to joint funding. So far mass crowdfunding has improved the marketplace for small projects and trinkets. The wealthy constitute a different strata of the marketplace — in the clouds, relatively — and RichClowd exists to improve the marketplace for monuments, public and personal, and other monumental projects.

“Through exclusivity RichClowd will enable projects with higher class, bigger vision, and that ultimately long-lasting contributions to society”, said RichClowd founder Mike Linksvayer, who continued: “Throughout human history great people have amassed and created the infrastructure, artifacts and knowledge that survives and is celebrated. As the Medicis were to the renaissance, RichClowders will be to the next stage of global society.”

RichClowd will initially have a membership fee of $100,000, which may be applied to project funding pledges. To ensure well-capitalized projects, RichClowd will implement a system called Dominant Assurance Contracts, which align the interests of funders and creators via a refund above the pledged amount for unsuccessful projects. This system will require creators to deposit the potential additional refund amount prior to launching a RichClowd project.

For the intellectual products of RichClowd projects, use of a forthcoming RichClowd Club License (RCCL) will be encouraged, making outputs maximally useful to funders, while maintaining exclusivity. Egalitarian projects will have the option of using a free public license.

The technology powering RichClowd.com will be developed openly and available under an AGPL open source badgeware intellectual property license. “RichClowd believes in public works. In addition to the many that will be created via the RichClowd service, open development of the RichClowd.com technology is the company’s own direct contribution to the extraordinary public work that is the Internet”, said Linksvayer.

About RichClowd

RichClowd is a pre-launch exclusive crowdfunding service with a mission of increasing the efficiency of bringing together great wealth and great projects to make an amazing world. Based in Oakland, California, a city with a reputation for poverty and agitation, RichClowd additionally takes on the local civic duty of pointing out Oakland’s incredible wealth and wealthy residents: to begin with, look up at the hills.

Contact

Mike Linksvayer, Founder
biginfo@richclowd.com

• Some people think the addition of conditions that are in effect non-copyright regulation are also required, but others disagree, and given widespread ignorance about and noncompliance with copyleft regulation, I put in the class of probably important (is there anyone conducting serious research around this question?) rather than that of unambiguously required. In any case, current copyleft conditions would be nonsensical if not layered on top of permissions.
• I’ve heard the argument made that no mechanism is needed: culture aided by the net will route around copyright and other restrictions, just ignore them. I can’t find a good example, but some exhortations and the like of copyheart and kopimi are a subset of the genre. But unless one can make the case that the participation of wealthy litigation targets (any significant organization, from IBM to Wikimedia) is a net negative (and that’s only the first hurdle for such an argument to clear), a mechanism for permissions that appear legally sound to the copyright regime seem unambiguously necessary.
• There are lots of other real and potential restrictions that permission can and may be possible to grant around, but so much progress has been made with only copyright permissions explicitly granted, and how other restrictions will play out largely a matter of speculation, that I put other permissions also in the class of probably important rather than unambiguously required.

Each of these merit much more experimentation and critique, but while any progress on the first two will inevitably be controversial, progress on the third ought be celebrated and demanded. (For completeness sake, progressive changes in social policy must also be celebrated and demanded, but out of scope for this post.) I see few excuses for new licenses and dedications to not aggressively grant every permission that might be possible or needed, nor for new projects to use instruments that are not so aggressive (with the gigantic constraints that use of existing works and the non-existence of perfect instruments impose), nor for communities that vet instruments to give a stamp of approval to such instruments — indeed if politics and path dependencies were not an issues, such communities ought to push non-aggressive instruments to some kind of legacy status.

In this context I am happy with the outcome of the submission of CC0 to the Open Source Initiative for approval: due to not only lack of, but explicit exclusion of patent permissions, Creative Commons has withdrawn the submission. Richard Fontana’s and Bruce Perens’ contributions to the thread are instructive.

I still think that CC0 is the best thing Creative Commons has ever done — indeed I think that largely because of the above considerations; I don’t know of an instrument that makes as thorough attempt to grant permission around all copyright, related, and neighboring restrictions (patents aren’t in any of those classes) — and remain very happy that the Free Software Foundation considers CC0 to be GPL-compatible (I put GPL-incompatibility in a class of avoidable failure separate from but not wholly unlike not granting all permissions that may be possible, unless one is experimenting with some really novel copyleft regulation).

From the OSI submission thread, I also highly recommend Carl Boettiger’s plea for a public domain instrument appropriate for heterogeneous (code/data/other) products. It will (and ought to) take Creative Commons a long time to vet any potential new version of CC0, but fortunately as I’ve pointed out before, there is plenty of room for experimentation with public domain mechanisms, especially around branding (as incompatibility is less of an issue; compare with copyleft (although if one made explicit compatibility a requirement, there is plenty of potentially beneficial exploration to be done there, too)). An example of such that attempts to include a patent waiver is the Ampify Unlicense (background post).

I hope that the CC0/OSI discussion prompts a race to the bottom for public domain instruments, as new ones attempt to carve out every possible permission. This also ought beneficially affect future permissive and copyleft licenses, which also ought grant every permission possible, whatever conditions they layer on top. Note that adding one such permission — around sui generis database restrictions, is probably the most pressing reason for Creative Commons to have started working on version 4.0 of its licenses. I also hope that the discussion leads to increased collaboration and knowledge sharing (at the very least) across domains in which public licenses are used, taking into account Boettiger’s plea and the realities that such licenses are very often used across several domains (a major point of my recent FOSDEM talk, see especially slides 8-11) and that knowledge concerning commons governance is very thin in every domain.

But keep in mind that most of this post concerns very small potential gains relative to merely granting copyright permission (assuming no non-free conditions are present) and even those are quite a niche subject.☻

In any case, for the last few months I’ve usually run my web browser (Firefox) in full screen mode, saving precious vertical real estate, and removing one source of distraction (seeing other tabs). In its default setting, move the pointer to the top of the screen to see tabs and URL bar. You have to switch out of full screen mode (merely press F11) to access the menubar. If you hate needless animation like I do, go to about:config and set browser.fullscreen.animateUp to 0.

F11 also works in Chromium (one has to toggle out of full screen to see other tabs, which makes sense, as tabs occupy the title bar), Konqueror (but the URL bar won’t go away unless you turn it off separately; very old feature request), and Ephipany (but again the URL bar won’t go away, there’s a very old feature request for that, and turning it off first causes a crash).

Although I used to swear by vertical tabs (most recently with an extension called Vertical Tabs), I’ve stopped using them. They remain visible in fullscreen mode, make it too easy to pile up hundreds of open tabs, and bizarrely my laptop screens have fewer pixels than they did in 2005, so I don’t have an urge to use up horizontal space).

Ada has an interesting history that I’d like to hear more about, with the requirement of highly reliable software (I suspect an undervalued characteristic; I have no idea whether Ada has proven successful in this regard, would appreciate pointers) and fast execution (on microbenchmarks anyway), and even an interesting free software story in that history, some of which is mentioned in a FOSDEM pre-interview.

I suppose FOSDEM’s low cost (volunteer run, no registration) and largeness (5000 attendees) allows for such seemingly surprising, retro, and maybe important tracks — awareness of computational diversity is good at least for fun, and for showing that whatever systems people are attached to or are hyping at the moment are not preordained.

I also wanted to mention one lightning talk I managed to see — Mike Sheldon on Libre.fm [update 20120213: video], which I think is one of the most important software projects for free culture — because it facilitates not production or sharing of “content”, but of popularity (I’ve mentioned as “peer production of [free] cultural relevance”). Sheldon (whose voice you can hear on the occasional Libre.fm podcast) stated that GNU FM (the software libre.fm runs) will support sharing of listener tastes across installations, so that a user of libre.fm or a personal instance might tell another instance (say one set up for a local festival) to recommend music that instance knows about based on a significant history. Sounds neat. You can see what libre music I listen to at alpha.libre.fm/user/mlinksva and more usefully get recommendations for yourself.

Addendum: In preemptive defense of this post’s title, of course I realize neither microkernels nor Ada are remotely weird, retro, alternative, etc. and that there are many other not quite mainstream but still relevant and modern systems and paradigms (hmm, free software desktops)…

I got on the wrong train to the airport and got to see the Leuven train station. I made it to the airport half an hour before my flight, and arrived at the gate during pre-boarding. Try that in a US airport.