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Open source culture (OSC) is a term that derives from open source software and the open source movement. Open source software is software with its source code made freely available; end-users have various degrees of rights to modify and redistribute the software, as well as the right to use the software for commercial purposes. "Open source" as applied to culture defines a culture in which fixations are made generally available. Participants in such a culture are able to modify those products and redistribute them back into the community. Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...
The open source movement is an offshoot of the free software movement that advocates open source software as an alternative label for free software, primarily on pragmatic rather than philosophical grounds. ...
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Intellectual property law OSC is a culture that supports and promotes the sharing of culture. For some, OSC describes a balance between freedom and exclusive rights (and the surrounding ethos of proprietary culture). They maintain that the experience of culture is influenced by exclusive rights as implemented in copyright law. Artists, programmers, and other authors are understood as having limited ownership over their creations. Current laws are instrumental in maintaining a creator's economic and moral rights for a limited time, while allowing for exceptions in certain cases pertaining to "fair use". Legally, copyright obtains to an expression as a "fixation," and licensing becomes the legal way of using copyrighted works. In law, an exclusive right is the power or right to perform an action in relation to an object or other thing which others cannnot perform. ...
Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. ...
Look up Fixation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
Open source culture versus free culture The idea of an "open source" culture runs parallel to "Free Culture," but is substantively different. Free Culture is a term derived from the free software movement, and in contrast to that vision of culture, proponents of OSC maintain that some intellectual property law needs to exist to protect cultural producers. Yet they propose a more nuanced position than corporations have traditionally sought. Instead of seeing intellectual property law as an expression of instrumental rules intended to uphold either natural rights or desirable outcomes, an argument for OSC takes into account diverse goods (as in "the Good life") and ends. The book cover Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2004) is a book by law professor Lawrence Lessig that was released on the Internet under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial license (by-nc 1. ...
The free software movement began in 1983 when Richard Stallman announced the GNU project. ...
Technology One way in achieving the goal of making the fixations of cultural work generally available is to maximally utilize technology and digital media. As predicted by Moore's law, the cost of digital media and storage plummeted in the late 20th Century. Consequently, the marginal cost of digitally duplicating anything capable of being transmitted via digital media dropped to near zero. Combined with an explosive growth in personal computer and technology ownership, the result is an increase in general population's access to digital media. This phenomenon facilitated growth in open source culture because it allowed for rapid and inexpensive duplication and distribution of culture. Where the access to the majority of culture produced prior to the advent of digital media was limited by other constraints of proprietary and potentially "open" mediums, digital media is the latest technology with the potential to increase access to cultural products. Artists and users who choose to distribute their work digitally face none of the physical limitations that traditional cultural producers have been typically faced with. Accordingly, the audience of an open source culture faces little physical cost in acquiring digital media. Bold textDigital media (as opposed to analog media) usually refers to electronic media that work on digital codes. ...
Growth of transistor counts for Intel processors (dots) and Moores Law (upper line=18 months; lower line=24 months) Moores Law is the 1965 prediction by Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) that the transistor density of semiconductor chips would double roughly every 18 months. ...
(19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the...
In economics and finance, marginal cost is the change in total cost that arises when the quantity produced (or purchased) changes by one unit. ...
Essentially born out of a desire for increased general access to digital media, the Internet is open source culture's most valuable asset. It is questionable whether or not the goals of an open source culture could be achieved without the internet. The global network not only fosters an environment where culture can be generally accessible, but also allows for easy and inexpensive redistribution of culture back into various communities. Some reasons for this are as follows.
First, the internet allows even greater access to inexpensive digital media and storage. Instead of users being limited to their own facilities and resources, they are granted access to a vast network of facilities and resources, some for free. Sites such as Archive.org offer up free web space for anyone willing to license their work under the Creative Commons license. The resulting cultural product is then available to download for free (generally accessible) to anyone with an internet connection. Internet Archive, San Francisco The Internet Archive (archive. ...
Version 2 of Some Rights Reserved logo No Rights reserved logo The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. ...
Second, users are granted unprecedented access to each other. Older analog technologies such as the telephone or television have limitations on the kind of interaction users can have. In the case of television there is little, if any interaction between users participating on the network. And in the case of the telephone, users rarely interact with any more than a couple of their known peers. On the internet, however, users have the potential to access and meet millions of their peers. This aspect of the internet facilitates the modification of culture as users are able to collaborate and communicate with each other across international and cultural boundaries. The speed in which digital media travels on the internet in turn facilitates the redistribution of culture. An old rotary telephone This article is about telephone technology. ...
Through various technologies such as peer-to-peer networks and blogs, cultural producers can take advantage of vast social networks in order to distribute their products. As opposed to traditional media distribution, redistributing digital media on the internet can be virtually costless. Technologies such as BitTorrent and Gnutella take advantage of various characteristics of the internet protocol (TCP/IP) in an attempt to totally decentralize file distribution. A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively few servers. ...
It has been suggested that Online diary be merged into this article or section. ...
A social network is a map of the relationships between individuals, indicating the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds. ...
The BitTorrent logo BitTorrent is the name of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol. ...
Gnutella (pronounced or ) is a file sharing network used primarily to exchange files. ...
The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs. ...
Government and public policy As local governments come under pressure from institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Intellectual Property Alliance, some have turned to open source software as an affordable, legal alternative to both pirated material and expensive computer products from Microsoft, Apple and the like. The government of Pakistan, for example, established a Technology Resource Mobilization Unit in 2002 to enable groups of professionals to exchange views and coordinate activities in their sectors and to educate users about free software alternatives. GNU/Linux is an option for poor countries with little revenue available for public investment; Pakistan is employing open source software in public schools and colleges, and hopes to run all government services on Linux eventually. The spread of open source culture affords some leverage for these countries when companies from the developed world bid for government contracts (since a low-cost option exists), while furnishing an alternative path to development for countries like India and Pakistan that have many citizens skilled in computer applications but cannot afford technological investment at "First World" prices. WTO Logo The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international, multilateral organization, which sets the rules for the global trading system and resolves disputes between its member states, all of whom are signatories to its approximately 30 agreements. ...
The International Intellectual Property Alliance was created in 1984 by a variety of private firms in the copyright-based industries of the United States. ...
The Microsoft Corporation, commonly known as just Microsoft, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual sales of US$44. ...
Apple Computer, Inc. ...
The Technology Resource Mobilization Unit, also known as TReMU or Linux Force, is part of an effort to overcome proprietary computer technology in Pakistan. ...
The Ministry of Defense in Singapore began switching its computers from Microsoft to open-source software in 2004, while South Korea, China and Japan agreed to cooperate in creating new Linux-based programs. The makers of proprietary software in developed nations have followed these trends and discouraged the use of free software. Microsoft has argued that Linux is not actually a free and original system but, rather, a violator of more than 228 patents, and the SCO Group Inc. has also charged that Linux is based on its Unix operating system. The SCO Group, Inc. ...
Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...
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