29 Oct
2003
29 Oct
'03
6:50 a.m.
But then it cannot be distributed commercially freely
by anyone. It
cannot be sold if you don't get a special permission to do so. So
actually the license doesn't give the user the full rights.
What you seem to be saying is that user freedom is more important than
artist freedom. Why should an artist be compelled to to grant rights
to users? Free software, or culture, is a gift - it's not something
that users can demand.
I don't quite see, why the right to use something
commercially must
be considered something else than the right to run a program,
listen to a CD or give away a book.
Because we live in a capitalist economy where artists still have to
buy food even if they give their work away for free. I can really
understand why an artist would not want some parasite making a good
living from their work while the creator of that work starved. It's
not like that's a new situation - ask a van Gogh dealer how much they
make.
rejecting a licensee the right to commercial use
simply is another
kind of license than what a free license should allow.
That's a matter of opinion. The original Ghostscript licence is just
one example of a licence that prevents third-party commercialisation.
I think it's worth pointing out that when Richard Stallman wrote the
GPL, he was working in an academic environment and he didn't have a
family to support.
I mean, programmers like Paul Davis put months and
years of work
into free software, too, without holding back the right to
commercial use.
Sure, and that's Paul's right to do so because he wrote the code - but
Paul is also asking for financial support for Ardour from users and
has proposed an added-value distribution which will be sold. It's up
to Paul to work out a business model that suits him, but I doubt he
would be happy if other people were selling an added value version
and not putting at least some of the money back into development.
Why should artists get to keep more rights for
themselves
than the programmers?
In theory they should not, but in practice the treatment of artists
has been much worse than that of programmers. A merely average
programmer has been able to make a good living over the past 20 or so
years, but that isn't true of artists.
Besides, if you really believe in artist freedom, then the artist
should have the freedom not to grant any rights to users over their
work. Of course, it would also be the case that the users should have
the freedom to ignore the work of those artists.
With the advent of DRM, I'm having no difficulty ignoring music that I
didn't want to listen to anyway. The day my radio can silence Madonna
because I haven't paid her, I'll be a happy man...
Cheers
Daniel