free // Joshua Wagner Online

Open or Closed, Part II: License and Free(dom)

July 10, 2009 | Art | Technology

sourcecode

I found another portion of the open or closed question. What about open and closed software licenses?

Here’s a quick rundown of the license categories (check here for more details):

GNU GPL type licenses. Very open.
Liberal Licenses (i.e. Creative Commons type, Mozilla Public License). Mostly open.
Closed source (i.e. proprietary license). Closed.

The more open your license, the more innovation you generally have. WordPress is licensed as GPL. Anyone can see and edit the WordPress code, and thus, a very diverse, dynamic, and versatile platform has emerged.

The problem with the GPL type licenses, that I see, is the return. I can’t really reap the rewards for my work when anyone else can make a tweak and give it away. Also, if you were to combine a GPL licensed work and any non-GPL work, according to the license you’d need to release the whole larger work as GPL. Effectively, you’d have to release your closed source code to abide by the license. It doesn’t sound very “free” to me.

The liberal licenses form the middle, allowing open source innovations but with the option to combine works or the option to redistribute with different licenses. They tend to play nice with GPL (as in the work can be licensed under GPL without breaking the other license), and might allow greater return.

In recent times, closed source hasn’t had the best run. Just take a look at the state of the music business to see what happens when you overuse the “closed” idea. But yet, closed source still generates the revenue.

I’m not an expert with these licenses, nor am I a lawyer. But this I do know: forcing people to use a particular license is not freedom. That part of the GPL rubs me the wrong way. I do understand the desire to not be ripped off, as in the case of a closed source project essentially stealing open source code. That isn’t right either.

So, where do you stand? I don’t know at the moment for myself. As a content creator, I want return on my investment (or at least control of it). As a content user, I want to be able to use and improve what is there. Is there an answer? Let me know what you think.

[ Image by acme ]

Comments (159)

Notice for WordPress Theme and Plugin Developers

July 4, 2009 | Technology

themespluginsdb Just wanted to pass some info along to all of you budding theme developers. Your themes need to be licensed under GPL.

Well, okay, part of them. According to this article from WordPress the php and html in your themes are GPL because WordPress itself is under the GPL. However, the css files and any images in your theme do not technically need to be licensed under the GPL. Talk about a monkey wrench!

What that means is technically you could pull off a case where you can hold all the rights to your css and image files to control the php and html. Now, I’m not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination (and the only area I know something about is music copyright law), but that seems to be really tricky.

As an aside, this is really only a problem for premium themes and plugins. Because the php and html are derivative works of WordPress, you must follow the GPL. That does not mean that you cannot charge for your time, effort, and distribution of the themes or plugins. But you have to allow for the provisions of the GPL; namely, your code must be available, and anyone else can modify and/or distribute the code without permission.

Ah, the new world of copyright and license. For me, I’ve spent a good amount of time coding, tweaking, and testing my WordPress Creations. And while I do agree that open is better, I would like the option to get something back for my effort.

Do you all have any thoughts? Any arguments for or against?

Edit: Well, it seems the crux of the argument is what constitues a derivative work of WordPress. This article details the problem. Thanks to Andrei from Softblog for the link.

Comments (932)

The Future of Music and the Flat Rate

March 22, 2009 | Music

This topic has been around for a while now. We talked about this very problem in a music business class I took in college (only a few years ago, but for digital things, that’s a while). Is the music “flat rate” the answer for the music industry?

I say no.

Here’s why.

The flat rate would be essentially a universal internet user tax that would pay for all downloaded music. That’s how I understand it. There’s probably a thousand different variations, but that’s the basis.

One big problem is the people who don’t get their music online. They subsidize the rest. Why should I pay for Jonny’s 183 GB worth of music? I only have 500 MB!

Another problem I see is that the music industry is essentially capping itself. If the tax is say $2 per internet user, that only pays for 2 songs per internet connection. If the average user downloads (or just listens) to more than that per whatever time period we use, then the industry loses money. As a business model, you want to be paid for what you do. It’s bad if you’re not compensated as much as you should. If I continued to do that in say, a bakery, then I would go under.

Now, subscription based services seem fine to me, but they’re especially useful for people who do buy/use a lot of music. If you’re going to buy 12 issues per year of some magazine, why not buy a subscription for the year and save some money? But for the person who only buys 1 or 2 copies over the year, the subscription isn’t worth it. They’ll pay less because they skipped the subcription.

By collecting the music fee, you take away that option for higher usage, and essentially make everyone pay a subscription fee. It’s like charging someone $20 to walk in a record store saying “Take what you want.” If you heard that, you’d go a pick out 20 or 30 CDs. At $15 per CD, the store just lost money!

And the silly thing is, the music industry has been giving away free songs for years. It’s called radio. In fact, they’ve paid people to play music on the radio! Now you’re telling me that they can’t figure out a way to monetize digital music other than by universally charging internet users?

Personally, I think things like Spotify or Pandora or YouTube are on the right track. Free music is the ultimate end of the digital revolution. It’s too easy to copy songs digitally and give them away for anyone to truly stop it now. YouTube is like radio MTV. Pandora is internet radio. Spotify is more like a new breed of music, combining social media aspects with radio. The trick is finding ways to create value in free music.

I don’t have an easy answer. But I do know that by giving enough away for free, you generate interest that will probably lead to sales. Charging a flat rate seems to be reaching to far, and I think there has to be a better way.

Any thoughts?

Posted via web from On Life, Stories, and Music

Comments (3,975)