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· Lawrence Lessig's Freeing Culture
· mirrored it at perl.org
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· Also by KM

Lessig's 'Freeing Culture' Keynote Online

posted by KM on 2002.08.13 10:27   Printer-friendly
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Ask writes "Leonard Lin put up Lawrence Lessig's Freeing Culture keynote from OSCON. It's excellent. It's great. It's the slides with audio in flash. So download that flash player already and click the url. I also mirrored it at perl.org. You still here? See it already, you *will* be entertained. Near the end of the keynote Lessig asked how many had donated to the EFF. Many hands went up. We felt great. 'Yeah, we're helping!' Then he asked how many had donated more than they spend on their broadband connection... I don't think I was alone in feeling a bit busted. :-)"
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  • Guilt? (Score:0, Flamebait)

    by djberg96 (2603)
    Then he asked how many had donated more than they spend on their broadband connection... I don't think I was alone in feeling a bit busted.

    Yeah? Next time stand up and ask him how much money he gave to charity last year.

  • As someone who was financially challenged and couldn't attend this year, this was great to watch/hear. Good stuff.
    • Ooops, for some reason Mozilla just moderated the above post as Flaimbait (which it's not) when I was moderating wickline's post below.

      Entering the discussion and posting something here should (if I understand Slash properly) undo that moderation.

  • an excerpt from the html documentation of a project...

        was released by the author Matthew Wickline
        into the Public Domain on 2001 July 17th.
        <!--
            Actually, the above is not quite true.
           
            I *really* authored the bulk of the code while recovering from
            a nasty hangover on Jan 1st 1900. As such, copyright has long-
            since expired. Subseq

    • Cute; but then people can sue you if they make your software break something in their system.
      --

      -- ask bjoern hansen [askbjoernhansen.com], !try; do();

      • > but then people can sue you if they make your software break something

        The license has a butload of disclaimers on it. This is just the copyright, which says "bits of this code are copywrite so-and-so, and used with permission... and the rest is all public domain"

        If folks sue me, I'd be happy to go to court and try for a court decision holding that software can be given away with source available and users can be held responsible for using it.

        I don't think a suit is likely, or know if I'd have a snow
        • If folks sue me, I'd be happy to go to court and try for a court decision holding that software can be given away with source available and users can be held responsible for using it.

          It's much easier to just say "if you use it you have to follow the license which says it can't be my fault" than to prove it wasn't actually your fault.

          I agree on it being highly unlikely to be sued, but I don't see any reason not to use the X license or something simple like that if what you want is just to give it away.

          --

          -- ask bjoern hansen [askbjoernhansen.com], !try; do();

          • > don't see any reason not to use the X license or something

            Call it stubornness or stupidity. It just bugs me that I have to have the copyright in the first place. Suppose copyright could expire (which, in theory it can)... then eventually the code is public domain and I don't have these worries. Why can't I speed that process up? Why should I have additional legal risk just because the code hasn't sat in a safe for a century? Would the code be better just because it's older?

            Sigh...

            > You can't do t

        • I don't think a suit is likely, or know if I'd have a snowball's chance in hell of defending against it, but it just seems wrong for folks not to be able to write free software because they could be sued. It's free. I disclaim any surity of suitability for any purpose.

          I'm not sure I have a strong opinion on this topic one way or the other, but I don't think the above statements make sense. With most things, if I create something dangerous (say, some poison gas in a tube) and leave it out in the open, i

          • > The fact that I created it and intentionally put it where
            > people could get their hands on it seems to be the important bit.

            If that is the important bit, then texts which contain instructions for making dangerous substances should not be left where people could get their hands on them.

            There is a tradeoff here. If you tend to see code as speech, and if you're a proponent of free speech, then you'll be more likely to allow folks to write whatever code they want so long as it isn't the code equivilan

    • I read that discussion some time back, but didn't make any note of where I found it. I've been looking for it for a long time.

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
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