[svlug] Fedora or Ubuntu for novis

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Alan DuBoff (aland at softorchestra.com):

> With that said, I know your involvement with the OSI and was 
> trying to pick your brain with this dialog. 

Sure, no problem.  (Lest anyone misunderstand, I'm just one of the
volunteer editor-guys for OSI.  I don't speak for them in any way.
However, I've participated in their licence review process for many
years.)

> I certainly don't have a reasonable answer for the bigger problem at
> hand, which seems to get down to patents and copyrights, hency my
> ambition to see copyrights removed...that is not so easy in our
> patent/copyright society *we* live in. Since I do plan to stay in the
> U.S. I need to work with the system in place.

Well, yeah.  Copyright reform is a supremely hard nut to crack, though,
and the main effort at this point is to prevent matters getting
radically worse.  Here's some reading for you, if you want to see how
much worse things can easily become -- and might do so soon:

http://www.eff.org/press/mentions/2008/9/18
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/09/17
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10039238-38.html

Even efforts to pass the very mild "Orphan Works Act of 2008", helping
people reuse (without fear of litigation) old works that probably nobody
cares about any more and might even have had their full copyright terms
expire, ran into a buzzsaw from photographer-industry lobbyists, who
have pretty much killed it dead.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works)

The _biggest_ thing needed is reduction of the utterly absurd and
ever-lengthening copyright term -- currently life-plus-70 for works
created by humans; 120 years after creation or 95 years after
publication for works of corporate authorship (whichever's earlier).
But every time "Steamboat Willie" approaches its expiration, Disney
brings out the big guns and gets Congress to tack on another 20 years.
So, things keep getting worse, there, going full-bore in the wrong
direction.

And that's just within the US.  The US wasn't even the driving force
behind the Berne Convention treaty that made the public domain almost
completely inaccessible.

I applaud your wanting to improve access to the public domain for
authors, but suspect in the current climate, that's not just akin to
King Canute ordering the waves to retreat; it's like him attempting that
on Galveston Beach during Hurricane Ike.

-- 
Cheers,                                     Ceci n'est pas une pipe:   |
Rick Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com