Freedom, not Price
Any of the RMS things where he explains ‘its about freedom not price’ and ‘you are free to charge a fee, and we encourage you to charge as much as you can’ is important to consider when examining non-commercial licensing terms like most of Creative Commons.
Creative Commons is essentially derived from Richards ideas, applying them to non-program software - “digital media” - as the FSF doesnt acknowledge that non-functional programs count as ‘software’. This is probably because they’ve all been using software to mean programs rather than data since the early 70s. I think with widespread Internet by the mid-late 90s, the nature of data changed dramatically. Is the Javascript running in a webbrowser software or page data? What about embedded Flash page data?
I think McLuhan is a good source of insights into all this, and he was writing in the 1950s! There’s also a lot of interesting stuff about all this in the early wired magazine.
The Freedom, not Price by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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