Sharing is caring

Most thoughts on open source are based on the idea of equipping individuals and ’small people’ in the face of corporate lockdown on great ideas. But then I got thinking again about the concept of intellectual property, which led me to… Creative Commons.

Although it’s not directly an open source element because it relates to creative content (as the name suggests) it is in many ways based on the ideology of open source. Sharing is caring. As it says on the CC website “Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian.”

But what I admire about the Creative Commons platform is that the individual producer (who is also most likely a user of other people’s stuff) has the power to decide to what degree their stuff is shared. For people who have creative production like photography as their profession, they are more than justified in copyrighting their stuff to protect their livelihood.

(And yes, I am aware that this may seem like a contradiction because people in companies who produce copyrighted software etc also earn their living from it but, as I discussed in my first post, there are still ways for open source companies to make lots and lots of money.)

Creative Commons is great because it takes the often corporately and geek-dominated concepts of open source and brings it to a relevant level for ‘common’ folk.