Following up on my own and a few others' previous postings, I have put together a selection of urls to information on Open Source and related issues. These are intended as an introduction to the topic for people who may be entirely new to it, or interested in learning more about it. They also provide some info on its relationship to contemporary arts practice.
This list is neither definitive nor exhaustive and there are many other resources available online. best wishes, Si. INTRODUCTORY TEXTS _The Open Source Definition_ This is a succinct outline of Open Source software. There are aspects of the principles given here which many people disagree with (such as whether or not to support/oppose commercial software), but it serves as a decent enough introduction. http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php _The Free Software Definition_ Another name, and slightly different perspective, on Open Source is "Free Software", this is an introduction to that view: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html _licenses_ At the heart of Open Source is the use of copyright (or copyleft) licenses which seek to ensure the "free" use of software in contrast to conventional "restricted" commercial licenses. http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html _The GNU Project_ Richard Stallman One of the pioneering Open Source/Free Software projects, by one of the pioneers of Free Software philosophy. http://www.fsf.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html _Free Culture_ Lawrence Lessig Relating to the broader issues of Open Source and intellectual property rights and why over-zealous commercial control of culture and innovation is generally bad for society as a whole. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessig.html _Open Source Intelligence_ Felix Stalder and Jesse Hirsh Comparing some approaches which effectively put into practice ideas similar to those which Lessig promotes, applying the Open Source model at a wider level. http://news.openflows.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/23/1518208 _A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism For the Net?_ James Boyle Relates discussions over intellectual property from an Open Source perspective to bio-informatics and genetic science issues. Argues that enviromentalism provides a suitable model for understanding the relevance of supporting a free public domain and open source ethos. http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/intprop.htm _Creative Commons_ Set up by Lessig, Boyle and others, Creative Commons promotes the concept of a collective "commons" for culture and knowledge, similar to the older concept of "common land" (an area of land set aside from private ownership for the collective good of the community - a concept which the good people of Cranston appreciate: http://www.ablab.org/cran/ston.html). One of the features of Creative Commons is that it provides the tools for individual creators to define their own licenses, thereby facilitating an Open Source approach to legal practice. http://creativecommons.org OPEN SOURCE + ARTISTIC PRACTICE _Free Software as Collaborative Text_ Florian Cramer If you only want to read one text I'd recommend this, provides an introductory definition of Open Source and Free Software, a bit of history behind their development, and their relationship to artistic practice and a broader concept of "net cultures". http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/copyleft/free_software/free_software_as_text/en//free_software_as_text.html _Art meet Net, Net meet Art_ Matthew Fuller Not directly dealing with Open Source but espouses related principles. A good text on exploring the relations between internet and gallery-based art. http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/mat1.htm _The Hi-Tech Gift Economy_ Richard Barbrook Again not overtly "Open Source" in topic but closely related. Takes a balanced, but optimistic, view of the internet as a legacy of Situationism and anarcho-communism. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/ _Culture Without Commodities: From Dada to Open Source and Beyond_ Felix Stalder Kicks off with Greil Marcus's "Lipstick Traces" and parallels some of Barbrook's text but with a more specific relation to Open Source and other recent developments. http://residence.aec.at/kop/writers/html/w3texts.html _read_me 2.3_ & runme.org "read_me" is a festival of software art, this site contains a selection of essays relating to the medium and the featured projects from this year's festival. Runme is a related online repository of software art. http://www.m-cult.org/read_me http://www.runme.org/ CRITIQUE _The Californian Ideology_ Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron The Open Source movement, like any large-scale ideologically informed movement, is a broad one with many differing views, some of which conflict with the views of others who also support it. One such aspect of that in relation to Open Source are the synergies between many American Open Source advocates, such as Eric Raymond, and "libertarian" free-market ideologies (Raymond is also part of the pro-gun lobby). This article by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron is a critique of that. The first url is for a site with the article and various responses to it, the second to a single page version that is easy to print. http://www.hrc.westminster.ac.uk/hrc/theory/californianideo/index/t.4.html http://www.alamut.com/subj/ideologies/pessimism/califIdeo_I.html ORGANISATIONS + INDIVIDUALS + WEBSITES The Free Software Foundation http://www.fsf.org/ OpenFlows http://www.openflows.org/ Detritus http://www.detritus.net/ Scottish Linux Users Group http://www.scotlug.org.uk/ Lowtech http://www.lowtech.org dynebolic http://dynebolic.org/ slashdot http://slashdot.org/ Freshmeat http://freshmeat.net/ Sourceforge http://www.sourceforge.net Richard Stallman http://www.stallman.org/ Eric Raymond http://www.catb.org/~esr/ Lawrence Lessig http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/ Felix Stalder http://felix.openflows.org/html/left.html ------------------------------------------------- a m b i t : networking media arts in scotland post: [EMAIL PROTECTED] archive: http://www.mediascot.org/ambit info: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and write "info ambit" in the message body -------------------------------------------------
