Lecture 7

The lecture, which was presented by Adam, began with the heading: Creative Commons and Free Libre Open Source software/ programs. He then followed with a slide with three keywords: Community, Collaboration and Choice. Which are basically the staples of Open Source and Creative Commons.

Delving first into Creative Commons and revealing its history, Adam introduced Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons (CC) - who in 2002, instigated a new form of copyright, but one that issued "Some rights reserved" as opposed to Copyrights "All rights reserved". This allowed the internet community more freedom in using other peoples material, providing a license which allowed the world to use a work of a separate author, without fear of prosecution. At this point, Adam played two videos: Wanna Work Together - produced by the Creative Common team and another which outlined the purpose and benefits of Creative Commons.

Then Adam moved onto Free/ Libre, Open Source Software (nicknamed FLOSS for short) and began with the notion of Source Code - the key ingredient, or instructions behind any program. Using a quote (Raymond 2001) "Historically software was free...anyone could contribute share and reuse source code..." which focused our attention on the principles of Free Software. Devised by Lawrence Lessig, the Principles of Free Software, to say briefly include: the freedom to run the program fo any purpose; the freedom to study how the program works and to add to it; the freedom to distribute copies in order to assist your neighbor and the freedom to improve the program and redistribute it for community benefit.

Finishing up, Adam defined and compared Open Source with Propriety Software, using examples such as Mozilla, VLC and Linux for the former and Microsoft Office, Mac OS, Internet Explorer for the latter. He suggested that we all give an Open Source program a try for at least 10 days - however seeing that I thoroughly use a number of Open Source programs, I'm going to argue: I've already done it.