aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Free Software, Free Culture

A friend who was at the Annual Associate Member Meeting of the Free Software Foundation was over for dinner last night to tell us all about it. The friend’s primary interest is GPLv3 and the grandfather clause. But he correctly assumed that I’d be most interested in a talk by Mako Hill on defining Free Culture.

My friend explains that there is a definition of free software: it is software that can be freely used, freely copied, freely modified and freely distributed. There had been no similar definition of Free Culture.

Last year Mako announced a project “to bring together artists, content creators, and others who care about freedom to come up with a clear set of goals around which a social movement for essential freedoms around culture might be based.”

In his Free Software Foundation talk he described how, like the Free Software definition, their result has four freedoms:

• The freedom to use and perform the work
  
• The freedom to study the work and apply the information
  
• The freedom to redistribute copies
  
• The freedom to distribute derivative works.
  

For more visit freedomdefinied.org.