[okfn-discuss] The GitHub generation

[William Waites]

Interesting. The this reflects a very important (in my opinion)
difference between the Free Software movement on the one hand and the
Open Source and Creative Commons on the other. This is perhaps the
defining difference between the two.

The idea behind Free Software was a kind of copyright jujitsu -- using
the idea of licenses to create a space where people could play nicely
together without having to worry about copyright as such. It was and
is a necessary mechanism to protect the community from the outside
world that wants to use copyright and licenses as a means to restrict
what people are allowed to do. Restricting what people can do is seen
as undesireable in general and a minimal set of conditions was settled
on that was intended to maximise freedom.

Open Source and Creative Commons is all about promoting copyright,
strange as it may seen. Maybe there's an open and a not so open
version of a piece of software, CC gives a whole selection of
different bits of restrictions that people may or may not want to
impose. OKF has gone some way towards mitigating this by asserting
a definition of what it means to be open, but in many ways this is
just re-treading the path the FSF has been on for 30 years.

This new trend, I take it as a new generation that actually don't
think the jujitsu is necessary. Their ecosystem is large enough that
they are perhaps comfortable simply pretending that copyright doesn't
exist. This is a promising development in my opinion. Far too much
time and intellectual effort has been spent worrying about licenses
instead of getting on with making things. It gives me hope for the
future. 

Cheers,
-w