[advocacy] Open source and business (was Open/Free/Personal music licenses)

[Bacchus Thirteen]

--- Daniel James <daniel at mondodesigno.com> wrote:
> > Daniel, as I thought, I think your interests are
> quite
> > different from EFF or GNU.  The are non-profit
> > organization:  They can speak for the rights but
> not
> > for the profit of the artists.  Therefore, it is
> very
> > natural of them not to list Personal License.
> 
> I wouldn't entirely agree with that in the case of
> GNU. RMS told me 
> he thinks the Personal Music License is OK, and he's
> never had any 
> objection to people being paid for 'free' stuff -
> remember it's free 
> speech, not free beer that he's interested in. He
> sold tapes of emacs 
> to make a modest living, in the days before he was
> famous enough to 
> win awards and earn fees on the lecture circuit.

In that case, I cannot understand why they did not put
Personal Music License on their lists.  I even thought
that GNU thought themselves for programmers and had
not so much interests in media contents, which is,
probably, not the case, either.

> > However, Open source cannot be set into
> > practice without profit-making companies.
> 
> Perhaps it needs the promotion that only commercial
> companies can 
> afford, in order to be heard amongst the loud hype
> of the proprietary 
> services.  

Yes, I understand the reason why you are cautious to
commercial organizations as they might become another
'middlemen.'  However, I have to point out that Google
is a company and they do not listen to any suggestion
if they think that it is not beneficial or even has a
risk of being involved in series of lawsuits.
 
> > Therefore, we need to have
> > good contact with them as long as they are
> politically
> > correct and not imitating patent-abusing
> companies.
> 
> Or artist-abusing companies...

Yes, I think I can understand your ideology.  You
consider each content should belong to each individual
artist.  However, any license is just letters if it
has no financial support.  At the moment, Personal
License lucks the financial support and probably this
is why you need to find rich and famous individual
artists who agree with the ideology of concepts. 
Therefore, the question is who should it be.  If you
cannot find one, that's it and you are stuck.  (Again,
you can correct me if I am wrong.  That's the beauty
of discussion mailing list.)

On the other hand, what I am suggesting is that
imitating what the programmers are doing.  Gathering
artists who agree with the license and letting third
companies which are interested in do their business
such as net radio, compression audio portal or any
other kind of business they can do with ogg and the
contents offered under Personal Music License.  To
make sure that the companies are not exploiting the
artists, the artists can use the discussion lists and
the web.  Artists may want to organize a web-based
non-profit organization like GNU specialized in media
contents or if programmers and artists can agree, they
can do the same thing under GNU.  This depends on
artists (and programmers in the case of the latter).

I wonder how it is practical but if Daniel's stuck and
there is no better idea on this topic, have we got
choice?  

> > Jack or Daniel, how about making directories for
> those
> > 'politically correct' business sites as 'open
> source
> > partners' or so?  Or have you got better ideas to
> > promote them?
> 
> I'd really like to see an Ogg Vorbis portal,
> although that would be a 
> lot of work and of questionable financial viability.
> Better would 
> be an .ogg filter on Google. It can already search
> inside PDF's for 
> text and search for images - it should be feasible
> to select 'Audio 
> search' and then list results by the contents of the
> comment tags. We 
> can only suggest it...

Unfortunately, that's the beauty of democracy and free
trade.  Even if we think that it is a good idea, if
nobody is interested in, that's it.  If we could force
the idea into practice, it is not democracy but
tyranny.

Bacchus

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