Week 7 - Response to Lecture

This week our topic is called 'Free Culture, Free Society.

The three key words for the lecture are Community, Collaboration, Choice.

Firstly we talked about creative commons which is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting reasonable copyright.

Creative Commons strives to provide people with the opportunity to edit someone else's software to improve it for the greater good of society or simply edit it to suit there own individual needs.

Basically Creative Commons (CC) enables some rights reserved rather than all rights reserved.

The idea was thought of by the free software movement who are seeking the right to voluntarily relax copyright protection to allow sharing.

We also discussed Free Libre, Open Source Software or FLOSS for short.

Richard M Stallman started the free software foundation back in 1981. His goal was to make a free operating system made totally from free software. The free OS was called GNU.

Source code is instructions written in programming language that tells a computer to do certain things. It is what makes computer software work.

Sharing open source code is similar to sharing recipes with friends, the friends try the recipe and then make their own adjustments to improve the taste before sharing their new and improved recipe with everyone again.

There are four free software principles:
Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs.
Freedom 2: The freedom to re-distribute copies so you can help your neighbors.
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so the whole community benefits.

The GNU public licence is to enforce the four freedoms of free software. This concept inspired Lawerence  Lessig to start the Creative Commons.

Open source software is an attempt to push free software into the business world. The name free software has been replaced with open source with the emphasis on 'open' not 'free'.

Proprietary software on the other hand is closed source software such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop.

One of the things the lecturer emphasized is that using proprietary software is like signing an agreement that says you can't tell your friends how to make nice food.

Some examples of free software (open source) include Open Office and Firefox.