At the 2002 Open Source Convention,
Lawrence Lessig
issued a challenge to the audience: spend more money
fighting the RIAA
and MPAA than you do
helping them by buying their products. I've
accepted that challenge. For the last four months, I've been making
donations to orgainizations which fight for freedom and open source
programmers and purchasing things from online artists who could use the
cash.
Lessig's Challenge is my new
website to track these donations.
My purpose is not only to fight Big Content, but to foster a gift economy
where people really can make money for their hard work. The majors want to
lock us up into their "trusted", DRM system. We need to fight against them
technically, with better P2P tools; we need to fight against them in the
market, by refusing to buy DRM products; we need to fight against them in
the legislature, by lobbying our representatives; and finally, we need to
co-opt the majors' niche by creating an alternative gift economy without
the middleman.
You can help. Donate money to your favorite open source project or
website. Give money to the EFF or ACLU (or both!). Buy a t-shirt from an
online comic strip or musician. Will you take
Lessig's Challenge?
<
wmf> <Look> "I am Look,
affiliated with the late
Martin Hekkelman,
lead programmer of the democratic republic of
Pepper. I urgently need your assistance in recovering some source
code..."
Yup, some folks are trying to free the source
code to Pepper, and I'd like to help them. Not because I use Pepper, but
because I want to see these Blender-style
source buyouts succeed. It's proof of concept for the
gift economy.
Yes, the Free Pepper website kind of sucks. Erik of infoAnarchy
criticized it as
"bland and uniformative" and several posters on the
OS News board said much
the same thing. But since he posted that story, Free Pepper has added
Pepper demos for 3 platforms and noted what license they'll be releasing
Pepper under if they succeed (BSD/MIT-style, a wise choice). Now they just
need to make a progress meter like Blender had, put it somewhere visible
and publicize the hell out of it.
Oh, and maybe some proof that they're not out just to rip people off...