Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Open standards create value. Not the exclusive sort of “value” which means blocking competitors from entering the market, but the inclusive sort, where anyone can benefit from the low barriers to entry and compete based on the quality of what they build using those standards. Of course, you already know this or at least I don’t need to explain it again, but sometimes ideas can be made more reusable (for inspiring other ideas) with the help of a good example. You could say that human memory itself is an open standard, in that the means for committing an idea to memory (at least temporarily) is well known: memory is automatic.

Freedom and copyright

I have long intended to blog about my personal views on licensing software, not least because the software I write and publicise here should be accompanied by the reasoning behind the choice of licence. Previous posts have probably made clear that I have benefited from [Free] Software, that is, software which is licensed in a way that gives licensees the Four Freedoms (no, not those Four Freedoms). It is thus easy for me to see the advantage to society and the overall economy that Free Software brings, and correspondingly hard for me to justify licensing my own software in a way that disadvantages society and the economy. If my software were of unusually high value (or I were unusually remote from society and the economy) there might be some net value to me in restrictively licensing my software, but to base my decision on that alone assumes that I am not prepared to make the slightest sacrifice (or equivalently, the slightest effort) to improve society or the economy.