I'm starting a collection of mirrored pieces that either A) truly shaped opinion about copyleft, free software, or linux or B) provide incredibly useful to helping new comers understand the community and philosophy behind the free culture and free software movements. So I'm asking you, what do you think are some of the most important pieces out there?
Read more »Ask Fsdaily: What are some of the most important essay about Freesoftware and Copyleft?
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“US copyright law is far too strict” – GNU founder
"American software freedom activist Richard Stallman, better known as the author of GNU General Public License, joined RT to give his comments on modern software copyright laws, and the risks of cyber sneaking. The interview is available in Ogg Theora format..."
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Open Source and Copyleft in a Copyright, Closed Source World.
What does online community mean to you? Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community organizer, is working on a new project The Art of Community. This new project revolves around the creation of, and discussion of a book, which Jono is releasing under that same title, and licensing with a Creative Commons Liscence.
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Al Jazeera Announces Launch of Free Footage under Creative Commons License
"Doha Qatar – January 13, 2009: Al Jazeera Network today announced the world's first repository of broadcast quality video footage released under the ‘Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution’ license.
Read more »Copyleft: Sita’s Distribution Plan
RMS: « An award-winning independent film, "Sita Sings the Blues", has been blocked from release by the impossible demands of the copyright industry for old song recordings it uses. The producer aims decided to release it under copyleft in order to get it out. »
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DebGems announced as Proprietary Platform: Why the GNU Affero GPL is Freedom for Network Services
"...copyleft is a tool designed to spread freedom in software, at any cost. The FSF, which wrote the GNU and Affero licenses, has the goal to make all software free as in freedom. Companies are ‘free’ to join the revolution, or to look somewhere else for their needs.
Read more »Free Software And Proprietary Dead-ends
"...There’s nothing wrong with charging money for the redistribution of this code either. Noone says anybody should provide stuff for free, just because it is GPL’ed “free” software. What the freedom in “free software” means is that anyone who obtains the code also remains at liberty to redistribute the GPL’ed code and charge for it too, if he or she wishes to do so..."
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Free Art license - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Free Art license is the English language version of the Licence Art Libre, a French copyleft license for works of art. Created in July 2000, it is the first free license, in the spirit of the GNU General Public License, dedicated to works of art..."
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Reporting violations of GNU licenses
"...Once you have collected the details, you should send a precise report to the copyright holder of the packages that are being misused. The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take action to enforce the license..." -- via GNU Affero General Public License
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Free Art License 1.3
"Most of my works (music, writing, photographs, illustrations, graphic design) are covered by the Free Art License 1.3. which allows others to freely share and build upon them. The following is a brief explanation of the rules for using and sharing my works covered under this license..."
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An open response to Chris Frey regarding GFDL 1.3 - by RMS
"Dear Mr. Frey, Your letter about our recent change to the GFDL, which lets operators of some GFDL-covered wiki sites relicense their contents under Creative Commons BY-SA license, raises the important questions of whether this change and the way we made it were proper, and what they imply in regard to trusting the FSF's stewardship of our licenses in the future..."
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Free Culture and Copyleft: A social movements perspective
"Radical militant librarians are out to destroy the music industry. Or at least, that’s what you might come to believe if you listen to the RIAA’s arguments. The recording industry and other corporate lobbies have convinced policymakers for decades that intellectual property protections are necessary to motivate the production of creative works.
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GPLv3/AGPLv3 Adoption: If It Happened Too Fast, I'd Be Worried
"Since the release of GPLv3, technology pundits have been opining about how adoption is unlikely, usually citing Linux's still-GPLv2 status as (often their only) example. Even though I'm a pro-GPLv3 (and, specifically, pro-AGPLv3) advocate, I have never been troubled by slow adoption, as long as it remained on a linear upswing from release day onward (which it has)..."
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Copyleft has no impact on project activity?!
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!
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The Dangers of Weak Copyleft
"I’m trying to wrap my head around embedding, given the on-going attempts to make the DRM font format “Embedded OpenType” a W3C web standard..."
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