trying to prevent ideology – try openness and try again – don’t follow priests of openness

David Wiley’s point “content different from software” is worth to be discusssed:
music for instance is full of quotations – there are musician being able to make 10 quotations in 10 seconds of improvisation
music is performance – cannot be copied

elements of a short story or novel can be “quoted” (or “stolen”),
the point is: is the original better, or the remake?
is the idea or the plot more important than the elaboration?

if the remake is accompanied by an expensive marketing campaign to let forget, that it’s based on something …

the key of the term opennness is
is it transparent, that someone tried a remake or not?

softworkers can copy pieces of code, they may have access to
or they gather key ideas from a given, available working software
or reinvent independently

no one can judge, whether an implementation is based on a stolen idea (inside knowledge of a design or implementation) or if somebody invented independently

but softworkers must not open their sources
there are more ways of openness

“why aren’t we praising that?

For much the same reason we don’t praise employers who almost pay their workers a living wage, musicians who almost perform at concerts, lawyers who almost win cases and bloggers who almost make a coherent argument for doing the things that they have not done. They haven’t done what they want the kudos for achieving. It would be dishonest and counter-productive to pretend that they have in the name of-what? Popularity? Coolness?

“Excluding people from the club” is an emotive plea but it doesn’t hide the fact that it is a call to abandon the very principles it claims to be trying to further. People who wish to destroy, undermine or free-ride on what you are working towards are not your friends. It is the free culture equivalent of greenwashing.

Wiley’s more interesting question is why standards applied to software should be applied to cultural works. I’ve posted about this but the quick version is that software and cultural works should all subject to free speech, they are all copyrightable texts, copyright is a restriction on free speech, and copyleft is the most effective way of neutralizing that restriction for everyone.