Gavin Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > MJ Ray wrote: [...] > > As I understand it, iCommons has anti-commercialism > > written into its foundations (thereby closing it off from artists who > > need to make money from their free culture creations), uses hum-votes > > to makes decisions and doesn't record its meetings. > > Anti-commercialism couldn't be further from the truth; their 2006 summit > was sponsored by Microsoft. They didn't have as-offensive sponsors this > year, but commercialism is definitely welcomed.
Let me explain this a bit more fully: last time I checked iCommons Ltd, it was only to promote *non-commercial* sharing of creative works. Of course, limiting free culture sharing to non-commercial activity is attractive to Microsoft - for example, it would mean that free-software developers cannot sell their work! Essentially, non-commercial sharing limits production of free software and free culture to those who do other things to earn income - employed by Microsoft, for example. It is commercial in one way, in that it's very attractive to people who have large amounts of money, so they'll give some to iCommons, but it's ultimately anti-commercial for free culture and detrimental to society. Have the iCommons foundation documents changed to remove the non-commercial requirement and benefit society instead of legacy publishers? > [...] iCommons is not really a membership organization. [...] Yes, that may be another missing feature. > Also, what overhead are we trying to avoid duplicating? [...] Presumably Students For Free Culture will be doing mundane things like filing official returns, keeping accounts, paying corporation taxes or maintaining a tax-exempt status, and stuff like that. Those are overheads which it's good to avoid duplicating IMO. > I think we have the domain freeculture.net, which has previously been > offered for someone who wants to put it to a non-student use. If so, could we start an open social network (vCard, FOAF, and so on) on that domain? Regards, -- MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 - Webmaster-developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder, consumer and workers co-operative member http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ - Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://freeculture.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
