On Saturday 10 Jan 2009 4:43:11 pm shirish wrote:
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 16:35, Kenneth Gonsalves lawgon@au-kbc.org wrote:
<snip>
and is your mail art or literature?
its both for me.
could you explain what exactly is artistic, literary or even creative about the sentence 'its both for me'?
And before I am flamed for nitpicking, I would like to explain why I am flaming shirish:
I feel that by mindlessly releasing all his mails under a CC license he is guilty of trivialising and abusing the CC license which will bring it into disrepute.
Strong words! But justified.
Some time back, the government mandated playing the national anthem after every film show. Then they stopped. Reason: people were walking out during the playing of the anthem and thus disrespecting it. The national anthem should be played only on important occasions so that the respect is maintained. Same with creative commons license - and GPL also.
If you look at the home page of CC you will find this text:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Before_Licensing
this describes all the steps you have to take before releasing a work under the CC. Just putting it in a footer is mindless application of the license and an insult to the creators of the license.
So what happens if everyone follows Shirish and releases all their mails under CC? CC will cease to have any meaning at all. No one will respect it.
Please realise that the CC license has been crafted with great application of mind and care to ensure that genuine creativity be shared - and protected. Abuse of this license is an insult to the creators of the license and to the genuine artists who use it.
This applies not only to CC but also to the GPL. I am often accused as being anti GPL. I am not. I feel that GPL is an extremely powerful weapon - and as a powerful weapon it should be used in the right place and at the right time. I wept tears of joy when Harald Welte won his suit against Dlink and ran around like a madman showing everyone in the centre the first Dlink device I bought which mentioned the GPL. Yes, mission critical stuff like the linux kernel or iptables belongs with the GPL. Not cut and paste stuff that is 98% of software that is written.
Shirish has been candid enough to say that he will not change no matter how much I flame him. He has also said he is not bitter about the fact that I flame him. So why beat my head against a brick wall? Simple: he is incurable, but I am interested to make sure that the disease does not spread.
So, think before you use/abuse licenses.