Interspecies cooperation by Barry Rogge. License:
For those interested in some of my previous writings on intrinsic motivation, this survey paper by Simon Gächter may be of interest.
Key sentence:
[W]e find strong evidence that many people’s attitude toward voluntary cooperation is conditional on other people’s cooperation… Moreover, the fact that many people contribute more the more [...]
Sun has posted a new draft of their openjdk trademark license. If I read it correctly, it basically says you’re OK to use it as long as it is the ‘vast majority’ of the code is the same as the official codebase. The ‘vast majority’ language seems like a reasonable compromise, allowing the copyright license [...]
The next time I hear “we’ve licensed the specification under Creative Commons so anyone can implement the spec”, I’m going to scream at someone.1
To take a list from a Microsoft license I read yesterday, implementing a spec may require (among other things) licensing of “pending utility and design patent claims, copyrights, trade dress and trademark [...]
Several weeks of backlog from my feed reader:
shakespeare on entrepreneurship: ‘Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt!’ So true. Via.
I’m always on the lookout for examples that Hollywood is shooting itself in the foot, but I’m not sure this is one of them, since [...]
After I casually mentioned my support of the writer’s strike, a good friend told me that he thought that the strike was bad, in part because the writers should be getting a share of the profits and not of revenue (and since there were no profits in internet video yet, they should be getting nothing [...]
Matt Asay asks “Why should a customer care about IP assurance?” He and Savio Rodrigues both make what appears to be the same error: comparing IP to “environmental rules or workplace safety regulations”. There is a critical difference, of course: if the EPA or comes after Microsoft, and I use Microsoft products, I can’t be [...]
Wesabe’s Marc Hedlund is speaking at the Princeton Cloud Computing seminar I’m at. Their ‘data bill of rights’:
This Data Bill of Rights is our promise to you.
You can export and/or delete your data from Wesabe whenever you want.
Your data is your data, not ours. Our job is to help you understand and act on your [...]
A former co-worker of mine writes about the Live Journal sale; in particular, she has raised concerns in the past about content censorship on LJ and the impact that has on LJ users as citizens. Worth noting (from the comments) that LJ is free software, but that that only partially protects anyone- my friend’s network [...]
The New York LUG is having a legal-themed meeting this week, featuring James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center talking about “GPL3, The FOSS Legal Primer, and The Interaction of Licenses & Communities.” James is a great speaker and a good guy- hopefully he gets a good turnout. (I’m going to try to make [...]
I’ve been using a fair number of CC-licensed images in blog posts lately; I’ve had a lot of fun doing it- looking through and finding the pictures is often a blast. I’ve noticed others are doing more of this lately as well.
CC, by Franz Patzig, used under the CC-BY license.
Note that in all of the [...]
