The US Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has acquired a piece of software art for its collection and made it Free Software (Open Source).
The work is under a fully valid Free Software license (a version of the revised BSD license) with no well-meaning but destructive restrictions on use or onerous advertising requirements. http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/27/4663770/smithsonian-acquires-first-piece-of-code-for-design-collection "The museum hopes that the decision to add both the software and the code to its collection will not only help with issues of preservation, but also potentially change the way similar institutions view software in general. "We liken this situation to that of a specimen in a zoo," says Chan. "Open sourcing the code is akin to a panda-breeding program."" The acquisition of the work means that the copyright in it has been transferred to the Smithsonian. Artists are always told (rightly) never to sell their copyright, and selling a physical artwork (or a reproduction of one) does not normally transfer the copyright in it. But since the software is Free Software, the original authors are still as free to use it as anyone else (unless the Smithsonian turns evil and produces a proprietary version). So this is an effective if drastic-looking way of selling a digital artwork. As I have long argued, making software art Free Software is key to its conservation (among other things): 1. When people can copy the code there will be more copies, making it more likely that a copy of the artwork will survive. 2. When people can modify the code, it is more likely that the artwork can be kept running as hardware and operating systems change over time. 3. When people can study the code, it is more likely that the code will have an effect on other artistic production and become embedded in artistic culture in that way. 4. And when people can run their own copy of the code more people will experience the artwork and it is more likely that a copy will be kept running. This is a very positive model for other institutions to follow, although possibly with experimentation around the copyright assignment part (the Free Software Foundation's copyright assignment system is a good model for trusted non-corporate organizations). _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
