How do other cultures define IP?

American Indian tribes have many many different approaches to intellectual property. Along much of the Northwest Coast stories and artistic images are considered to be associated with specific clans and there are sanctions for use without permission. A family has rights to the myths and images that define them as a family. These are the same tribes that had the potlatch – an institutional way of ensuring that property was not hoarded.

Another approach was that of Chief Joseph, who although he fought to protect the land of his tribe still denied that his tribe “owned” that land or that anyone could “own” land. He prefered to say that he and his tribe had *guardianship* of the land.

So perhpas we could think about IG instead of IP, talk about the guardianship of ideas that *belong to everyone*. This allows for protection of author’s rights — they are guarding the ideas that they put forth and no one should be able to deny that the author is the guardian of their own work or be able to say that someone else should be able to mangle the work and distribute it as though from the original author. But it also allows for treating human progress as the property of all and provides a basis for insisting that laws protecting guardianship do not become a form of intellectual hoarding.

For one thing, one major thing is that there are for-profit companies who have decided that a good way to make money is to cash in on the whole thing. The people working on Open Source software at IBM and Redhat and taking home a paycheck. People at these places are going to work out their diffrences as well as they would at a closed source place.

The second thing is. I think some OSS projects are blessed with a good leader. Linus would be the best example. The BSD system has broken into 3 main branches do to ego conflicts, But Linux has stayed single. Due to the fact that A) Linus is the unquestioned leader, and B) Linus is a pretty cool guy as far as not being an egotistical prick.

If you look at something like the GNU core (gcc, the tools), you wonder how it managed to survive with Richard Stallman running things, but it has. But people do defer to Stallman and it works.

The most important thing in the Open Source world is how much work you do. If you deserve your ego, people will follow you and you can kind of do your own thing, if you don’t deserve your ego, you’ll get marginalized. (Like Eric Raymond 🙂

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Oh, and as far as the ‘blog protocol’ um, what? Why do we need new ‘blog protocol’s? HTTP seems to work fine. The market is definetly large enough to support multiple tools. There are plenty of file server protocols (SMB, NFS), lots of IM protocols (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and on and on). Lots of compression systems, ZIP, RAR, ACE, etc. If the protocols are open, toolmakers can support all of them. The task should be easy using open source libraries.

There’s no reason to be top-down draconian here.

Outlook? We’ve got Ximian Evolution. Office? We’ve got OpenOffice. Windblows? We’ve got GNOME/KDE on top of Linux, *BSD. Photoshop? We’ve got GIMP. Cisco routers? Commercial firewalls? We’ve got Zebra, iptables, ipf, pf, etc.
Proprietary Windows network sharing? We’ve got Samba. Oracle, Sybase, and SQL Server? We’ve got Postgress and MySQL. Visual Studio? We’ve got Eclipse, Emacs, gcc, perl, ruby, php, squeak, and so on…

Can they compete with both free beer and free beer recipes? On all fronts? I doubt it.

Or maybe it really depends on why people are working on open source projects — If they are working on them because they are passionate about coding, they probably will work well with other people. On the other hand, if there is some alternate motive, they may be doomed.

Just my 2c. 🙂

-J