on his Sunday CNN Show, Fareed Zakaria recommended this book and said it was relevant to the modern discussion of Ideas as Property (Patents). I should very much like to hear the perspective of DIY thinkers on the relative merits of Idea ownership, Idea sharing, and how they might reform the current Patent system. Is it still a tool for social mobility - and impetus for the Industrial revolution - as it was for Watts and his Steam engine - or has it been captured by static institutions in a way that precludes growth - especially from new entrants? Has the narrative of a man, a plan, a steam engine - become overwhelmed by patent sweatshops at MS and HP patenting the obvious and mundane, as a means of pulling up the ladder?
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If you license your work with open source, you still retain copyright. So you can actually give someone else a commercial license, even when you have licensed the first person with a GPL license. Copyright ownership is very important for Open Souce projects to understand and for the project to have a clear policy. At the Plone project, we had to write to every previous coder to get copyright assigned to the Plone Foundation. Every coder had to sign contracts. It was very tedious, but legally had to be done.
One day, the ardupilot and matrixpilot projects may have to do the same. It's a matter of timing for the community, and ultimate vision.
With copyright ownership, the project can switch licenses later. Without copyright ownership, the project can never change the license later unless every developer gives their consent. Finding developers later can be an impossible task.
Of course what you do in each of your roles is not hypocrisy, they are simply two different business models.
As someone who has been involved in the Free software movement for a long time there is a lot more to it than simple code reuse, I am more interested in the morals and Freedom aspect rather than seeing it as a way to get code written for no cost.
In my day job, we protect copyright. In my night jobs, I choose to renounce my copyright protections via Creative Commons. It not hypocrisy, it's duality ;-)
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