I’ll be speaking at eLiberatica in Bucharest in May, where Stallman will also be speaking, talking about OSS in education.

Need to get together (my treat this time) and chat about the Premier Go project, because that will be one of my topics …

When I was writing a piece on a hybrid IP model for software (Stallman would blow a gasket since I put patent and copyright and a few other goodies all together in a multi-phase protection-and-release model), I compared the camps. I was erroneous in that I lumped FOSS all together as one, though I’m not convinced either that they are as separate as rms makes them out to be – but I criticized both the FOSS movements and the pro-proprietary camp for their zealous belief that “There can be only one.” Proprietary needs the innovation, the rebellion, the software-cowboy hacker creativity of Free Software and Open-Source software developers; and there would be no information revolution without the market penetration that only quasi-monopolistic proprietary systems can promulgate.

Steve Bougerolle had some interesting and provocative comments on my post as well. He tends to lean quite close to rms’s stance, and is opposed to the IP umbrella, the paradigms it espouses, and the strategic compromises I advocated (which sent Stallman into a temper tantrum). I agree that the IP umbrella is flawed, and the very principals underlying the IP areas (primarily patent and copyright) are dangerously close to being houses of cards (at least in their current rhetorical implementations). I also think that there is a great deal of merit to the overarching IP paradigm. Though “intellectual property” may be too polemic and misleading, there are many threads uniting the concepts of patent, copyright, trademark, trade secrecy, licensing, etc., that could probably be better served with a re-invented implementation. Certainly software needs a new implementation, which was the impetus for my paper on the hybrid.

I’m going to add a link too; I hope it drives some of the people reading my entry to read this thread too.

How would one implement a multi-blog discussion technology? Aggregate the related posts on each blog, and echo the comments between them? That could be kinda cool. But you’re the social technology wiz…

To me all of those 4 characteristics apply to most of the open source software that I have encountered, although I have a feeling many commercial open source developers tend to keep their distance from Richard Stallman so they won’t come out as “anti-capitalist” or “anti-business”.

Being a diversity advocate I personally don’t think every software should be free. It is up to the creators to decide that.