Richard Stallman has also sent us a number of corrections to our foundational essay, which has been published in CTheory at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499
Richard Stallman:
Michel, you wrote: The fourth requirement is a legal infrastructure that enables the creation of use-value and protects it from private appropriation. The General Public License
It is the GNU General Public License (which prohibits the appropriation of software code),
you write: the related Open Source Initiative,
That seems to be a category error. The OSI is not a license, it is an organization, so it does not fit in this list. What was the motive for mentioning it here? Also, if you’re going to mention organizations the OSI, please don’t omit the Free Software Foundation, which came first.
you write: and certain versions of the Creative Commons license fulfill this role.
Do you mean “certain of the licenses published by Creative Commons”?
To call them “versions of the Creative Commons license” suggests that they are similar. In fact, the various licenses published by Creative Commons have very little in common. Many people hear the term “the Creative Commons license” and think there is just one! This is a
devastatingly harmful misunderstanding, so please help steer people straight.
you write: They enable the protection of common use-value and use viral characteristics to spread. GPL and related material can only be used in projects that in turn put their adapted source code in the public domain.
“In the public domain” means “not copyrighted”. Code covered by the GNU GPL is never in the public domain, because the GNU GPL operates using copyright law.
The same is true of nearly all free software licenses. (And nearly all open source licenses.) They work based on copyright law, so the materials they apply to must be copyrighted.
you write: P2P projects are characterized by equipotentiality or ‘anti-credentialism.’ This means that there is no a priori selection to participation. The capacity to cooperate is verified in the process of cooperation itself. Thus, projects are open to all comers provided they have the necessary skills to contribute to a project. These skills are verified, and communally validated, in the process of production itself.
Many projects operate this way, but it should be noted that not all free software projects do so. Also, the open source development model does not require this.