Archive for April 2010
Patently Absurd
So here’s a 28 minute movie about the current patent system in the USA. It’s a good study about how absurd a patent system for pure mathematical formulas is and might become in other countries.
Don’t shoot me for having an opinion, but I got some problems with it:
It doesn’t really explain the problem for non-technical people. I can’t use this to show a friend what might become a problem in Europe, because I would have to explain a lot myself: what is a «troll», what is software exactly, … On top of that I think more examples like the Beethoven part could’ve been given to make this movie a lot less abstract.
The main reason why I think this movie is not of any value is the license. It’s licensed with a creative commons attribution non-derivatives license (CC BY-ND). This means I cannot make any alterations to the movie, nor make subtitles which go more into detail, neither can I fix the sound in some parts of the movie, neither can I fix problems from the previous paragraph, … before I would screen it at my university.
When I asked someone involved in the movie if that’s really okay for him, a non-derivatives license, he responded: yes. I think ND, as FSF believes too, is good for “opinion stuff”.
I don’t think ND is good for “opinion stuff” at all though. When you make something around your opinion, you have three reasons for doing so:
- You want to be informative towards a certain public
- You want to persuade people for a certain cause
- You want to start a discussion
Since we live in a democracy, the latter is very important. People won’t change opinion because of a movie, they will change their opinion in debate. Not letting people make derivatives of a work equals taking away a manner of speech.
So in the end, with a ND licensed work around someone’s opinion, I cannot make the movie better for the same cause, neither can the other party take the movie and highlight their problems from the same perspective. I do not support this at all and in my opinion it makes this movie worth almost nothing.
-Pieter — follow me on identi.ca
Richard Stallman - Do you really support ND? (by Luca Lucarini - CC BY-SA)
LOAD
Today I was going to talk about Bash on the Linux Open Administration Days. I like to think that by taking the train instead of a car I’m being ecological. I like to think trains, most of the time, don’t run late and I like to think that normally they do exist. Yet again (if they’re not striking, there has probably been an accident. And if there hasn’t been an accident neither, they might have decided to polish the rails) public transport has abandoned me. I didn’t foresee an alternative and I could impossibly be there in time.
Cancelled
NMBS were “expecting interferences” for the entire day. So no LOAD for me this year.
Hereby I want to apologize to the entire LOAD crew for not showing up for my talk. As a little comfort here are my slides I would have used. Feel free to use them in any way you like.
Pieter — follow me on identi.ca
