Jonah asks Would a Saint in the Church of Emacs use gmail? This post raises the question of free-open-source code in the context of online services. A worthy read here short excerpt:

“Using free (as in beer) third party web services is very tempting, but I am worrying more and more about the traditional freedoms that free software protects against - vendor lock-in, proprietary data formats, and freedom to modify policy according to application specific requirements.”

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Prelinger questions googles archive practices around government documents in his post titled Google Book Search treats government documents as copyrighted material

here is an example:

Here’s what appears to be Volume I of Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor,the famous LaFollette Committee hearings on industrial espionage, strikebreaking and other unsavory weapons used against labor in the 1930s. If you click on the link, you’ll just see snippets. This is a public domain document published in 1936 by the Government Printing Office.

on march 3rd aphid and I did a radio interview with Timothy Jordan. An mp3 of the radio program is now avaliable. Show Summary excerpt:

This week Aphid and Michael Dale join us to talk about their C-SPAN [re]mediation project, Metavid. Monsters Are Not Myths play their song of the week, ‘Customer Service.’ Alec Stefansky covers the weather, the Patriot Act, and gives the Award of Excellence to some control freaks.

Check out the spring06 UCSC review which features an accessible article on Metavid. Here is the opening quote

“One evening last year, UC Santa Cruz graduate student Abram Stern logged on to the C-SPAN web site to gather information for an art project. Stern knew that the cable television network had been providing live, gavel-to-gavel coverage of U.S. Senate and House of Representatives proceedings for more than two decades as a public service, and he was looking to obtain some older footage from its archive”

Let us consider the problems of the GPL in a hybrid environment of GPL and non-GPL licensed code in complex networked system. Many are familiar with the classical arguments for GPL code, building on the shoulder of the collective, increased project visibility, shorter development time etc…

There is still major concern as it relates to individual and collective freedom with derivative liberated licenses (GPL) in a centralized networked environment. An environment where a corporation (lets call it corporation X) is centrally positioned and able to uniquely profit off of collective efforts of all that inhabit that network.

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This posting deals with an article written by Jonathan Zuck titled A bonfire of the vanities the article is a bit over the top, but it provides a context to explore some of the issues with the latest GPL draft. (more…)