Re: [h2o-discuss] low profile

[Eric Eldred <eldred@mediaone.net>]

i have no objection to esr restricting himself to code.
but then he should specifically say that his statements
apply only to code and not to other digital media.  and
he should explain how we can tell the difference.

i ran into this problem when the evangelists for the
debian program refused to back my campaign against strong
intellectual property protections for online books and
other digital media.  they claimed that it was a bad
idea to place things in the public domain, and that 
instead they should be copylefted.

i have no objection to copyleft, but you have to read
their licenses to understand that they are groping toward
some analogy with software but don't understand the domain
of other digital media.  in discussions with rms, i found
that he has different ideas about licenses for things like
online books.  and in reading statements from tim o'reilly
i find that he too has been attacked for heterodox views
on copyright of books, when he is truly struggling to find
a way to make the open software movement gibe with the need
to bring book publishing into the internet age.  none of
us has come up with a good way to generalize from open
software to Open anything else.  this needs a lot more
discussion and work.

unfortunately, somewhat sectarian battles between open
software advocates have obscured the need to bring all of
us in the Open movement together and work out common ways
of dealing with our common problems and issues.  coming
at it from not software but rather the international law
perspective, for example, james boyle has eloquently
posed the crying need to bring these advocates for a better
intellectual law theory together, and work out something
positive.  and we saw the beginnings of that last may
with the openlaw and opencode people coming together too.
and jpb has been advocating many of the same ideas in the
forums for freer digital music.

i feel strongly that there is a great need to do something
more to bring together these Open advocates and thinkers,
and to work out some better program for moving forward
together.  we are facing some time pressures, because
events are moving forward rapidly now:  private companies
are patenting parts of the human genome, the agrichemical
businesses are rapidly rethinking their ideas about
intellectual property protection, the poorest nations are
considering how they must respond to the strong IPR laws
of the richest nations, and the judges are having to rule
with very inadequate IPR theory, just weak analogies with
obsolete technologies.  if bcis doesn't do something 
positive, more concrete than in may, then somebody else
should.  who?


> Jon Garfunkel wrote:
> 
> Manuel Gutierrez Algaba wrote:
> >Yes, for a time I've been watching Raymond, and I definetely
> think
> >he's a kind of playboy of "Open Software" ( whatever it means).
> >Raymond is unable to any major work, so he has to do his best
> >in being a braggart.
> 
> I don't see how your value judgement about Eric Raymond's
> pretenstion is applicable here. He's worked on many software
> projects, and all power to him to work on open-source evangelism.
> 
> Eric Raymond is a pricipal of opensource.org. h2o is the
> principal behind opencode.org. Both promote open stuff. I was
> curious to find out, what does one say about the other?
> 
> h2o presents a vision document prominently on their website:
> "The Power of Openness." http://opencode.org/h2o/ . It's a
> proposed agenda from March 1999 contributed by David Bollier. In
> section III.A.1.p2 he writes:
> 
>      The work of open code opinion-leaders would be enhanced
>      if they had more opportunities to meet, converse
>      informally, plan strategically, develop personal
>      relationships, cultivate new institutional
>      collaborations, organize to address common goals, and
>      communicate them with larger constituencies and the
>      general public.
> 
> where Raymond has already been suggested as a "opinion-leader" of
> open-code.
> 
> I suppose that h2o has already started to implement this vision.
> Perhaps they sent out an invitation to Raymond to come aboard,
> and he interpreted their motives as a "non-software" effort, and
> thus is dismissing the h2o work in such way.


-- 
"Eric"    Eric Eldred      Eldritch Press
mailto:EricEldred@usa.net  http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/
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