So, what can we do? In the short term, it’s very simple. If you care about the commons, you should put your work under a strong copyleft license like the AGPL. That way, we will get back to building that commons we lost because of web services. If someone ever complains that a web service broke because of your AGPL code, reply that the whole web service should be under the AGPL too.

open source paradigms, with its copyleft licensing scheme

13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License. Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.

For open educators, this runs counter to the very reason we use OER in the first place. Many open educators choose OER because there are legal permissions that allow for the ethical reuse of other people’s material — material the creators have generously and freely made available through the application of open licenses to it. The thought of using work that has not been freely gifted to the commons by the creator feels wrong for many open educators and is antithetical to the generosity inherent in the OER community.

it is also clear that there would be no need for copyleft licences to govern the exercise of copyright in software code by third-party developers at all if copyright did not guarantee rightsholders such a high degree of exclusive control over intellectual creations in the first place

Copyleft licenses are institutions which support a knowledge commons of executable software.

“Naturally, you are free to take any liberties you wish with my published work. However, should I ever be granted the privilege of constraining your liberty then I constrain you thus: the liberties you take may not be withheld from those to whom you give my work (or your combined/derivative work), who you must similarly constrain.”

Why, when we are so worried about preserving freedoms, do we prohibit choice on the part of downstream users as to how they can license derivatives works they make? Why don’t we want to protect that user’s freedom to choose how to license his derivative work, into which he put substantial effort? The copyleft approach of both the Free Software Foundation and Creative Commons makes creators of derivative works second-class citizens. And these are the people we claim to be primarily interested in empowering. I can’t stress this point enough: the ShareAlike clause of the CC licenses and the CopyLeft tack of the GFDL rob derivers of the basic freedom to choose which license they will apply to their derived work. ShareAlike and CopyLeft privilege creators while directing derivers to the back of the bus.

Tal vez, en última instancia, este esfuerzo fue mi intento imperfecto para hacer una declaración político-ontológica, aprovechando los espacios ultra diseñados de aquello que llamamos la academia, el libro y el proceso de pensamiento.

La sociedad convivencial descansará sobre contratos sociales que garanticen a cada uno el mayor y más libre acceso a las herramientas de la comunidad, con la condición de no lesionar una igual libertad de acceso al otro [...] Una pluralidad de herramientas limitadas y de organizaciones convivenciales estimulará una diversidad de modos de vida, que tendría más en cuenta la memoria, es decir la herencia del pasado o la invención, es decir la creación

Sotheproblemthatcopyleftsolvedwashowtoprovidefreesoftwarebutmaintainitsfreedom.TheideaofcopyleftbecamethefoundationofageneralpubliclicenceknownasGPLandspurredglobalfreesoftwareandopen-sourcesoftwaremovements.

if the group should decide to fork Moodle together

the understanding of proprietary as synonymous with closed-sourced or nontransparent. Proprietary means having an owner who prohibits access to information, who keeps the source code secret; it does not necessarily mean having an owner who extracts a profit, although keeping the source code secret and extracting a profit often coincide in practice.

Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose. Instead of fostering privatization, it becomes a guarantee that everyone has the freedom to use, copy, distribute and modify software or any other work. Its only “restriction” is precisely the one that guarantees freedom – users are not permitted to restrict anyone else’s freedom since all copies and derivations must be redistributed under the same license. Copyleft claims ownership legally only to relinquish it practically by allowing everyone to use the work as they choose as long the copyleft is passed down. The merely formal claim of ownership means that no one else may put a copyright over a copylefted work and try to limit its use.

e the core of commons-based peer production entails provisioning withou t direct appropriation and since indirect appropriation—intrinsic or extrinsic—does not rely on control of the information but on its widest possible availability, intellectual property offers no gain, only loss, to peer production. While it is true that free software currently uses copyright-based licensing to prevent certain kinds of defection from peer production processes, that strategy is needed only as a form of institutional jiujitsu to defend from intellectual property. 136 A complete absence of property in the software domain would be at least as congenial to free software development as the condition where property exists, but copyright permits free soft ware projects to use licensing to defend themselves from defection. The same protection from defection might be provided by other means as well, such as creating simple public mechanisms for contributing one’s work in a way that makes it unsusceptible to downstream appropriation—a conservancy of sorts. Regulators concerned with fostering innovation may better direct their efforts toward providing the institutional tools that would help thousands of people to collaborate without appropriating their joint product, making the information they produce freely availabl e rather than spending their efforts to increase the scope and sophistication of the mechanisms for private appropriation of this public good as they now do.