Sandbox Culture
A Study of the Application of Free and Open Source
Software Licensing Ideas to Art and Cultural Production

Aymeric Mansoux
Supervisor: Matthew Fuller

Thesis presented for the degree ofDoctor of Philosophy

Centre for Cultural Studies,
Goldsmiths,
University of London,February 2017

I, Aymeric Mansoux, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is myown. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm
that this has been indicated in the thesis.

Date: February 19, 2017

Signed:Abstract
In partial response to the inability of intellectual property laws to adapt todata-sharing over computer networks, several initiatives have proposed
techno-legal alternatives to encourage the free circulation and transformation of digital works. These alternatives have shaped part of contemporary digital culture for more than three decades and are today often
associated with the “free culture” movement. The different strands ofthis movement are essentially derived from a narrower concept of software freedom developed in the nineteen-eighties, and which is enforced
within free and open source software communities. This principle was
the first significant effort to articulate a reusable techno-legal template
to work around the limitations of intellectual property laws. It also offered a vision of network culture where community participation andsharing was structural.
From alternate tools and workflow systems, artist-run servers, network publishing experiments, open data and design lobbies, cooperativeand collaborative frameworks, but also novel copyright licensing usedby both non-profit organisations and for-profit corporations, the impact
on cultural production of practices developed in relation to the ideas ofiii

free and open source software has been both influential and broadly applied. However, if it is true that free and open source software has indeed
succeeded in becoming a theoretical and practical model for the transformation of art and culture, the question remains at which ways it has
provided such a model, how it has been effectively appropriated acrossdifferent groups and contexts and in what ways these overlap or differ.
Using the image of the sandbox, where code becomes a constituent
device for different communities to experience varying ideologies andpractices, this dissertation aims to map the consequent levels of divergence in interpreting and appropriating the free and open source technolegal template. This thesis identifies the paradoxes, conflicts, and contradictions within free culture discourse. It explores the tensions between
the wish to provide a theoretical universal definition of cultural freedom,and the disorderly reality of its practice and interpretation. However,despite the different layers of cultural diffusion, appropriation, misunderstanding and miscommunication that together form the fabric of freeculture, this dissertation argues that, even though feared, fought, and criticised, these issues are not signs of dysfunctionality but are instead theevidence of cultural diversity within free culture. This dissertation will
also demonstrate that conflicts between and within these sandboxes create a democratic process that permits the constant transformation of thefree and open source discourse, and is therefore something that shouldbe embraced and neither resisted nor substituted for a universal approach
to cultural production.

iv

Table of Contents
Abstractiii

List of Illustrationsix

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

xiii

What Is Free Culture? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Research Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxi
Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxii
Limit of the Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxviii.
Structure of the Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxx
ProloguexxxiiiPart 1: Free as in… Culture

1

1 Paradigm Maintenance and User Freedom

6

1.1 Questioning the Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6

1.2 Source Code and the Individuation of the Programmer . . .

11

1.3 Engineering Freedom and User Groups . . . . . . . . . . . .

19

1.4 UNIX Connects the Dots, People and Pipelines . . . . . . .

26

1.5 The Growing Unix Fellowship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33

1.6 Controlling Software Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

38

1.7 Fratricide Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

45

1.8 The Need to Define . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49

1.9 Software Licenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

59

1.10 From Machine Instructions to Community Rules . . . . . .

63

Interlude73

2 In Search of Pluralism

76

2.1 Diffusion and Appropriation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

76

2.2 Prototyping Free Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83

2.3 Defining Free Culture and the Decay of Pluralism . . . . .

91

2.4 The Political Denial of Open Everything . . . . . . . . . . .

96

2.5 The Liberal Democratic Industries of Freedom and Openness 103
Part 2: Free as in… Art

113

3 Art Libre120

3.1 Free Art Incentives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
3.2 Licence Art Libre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
3.3 Usefulness of Legal Constraints as Safe Haven . . . . . . . . 137
3.4 Artistic Freedom versus Software Freedom . . . . . . . . . . 148
Interlude154

4 The Practice of Free-Range Free Culture

161

4.1 Mattin - Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
4.2 Nina Paley - Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
4.3 Stéphanie Villayphiou and Alexandre Leray - Process . . . 175

4.4 A Note on the Artistic Appropriation of the Free Cultural
Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
4.4.1

Save the GNou! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186

4.4.2

Fibre Libre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

4.4.3

CC Ironies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

Interlude

201

5 Free Cultural Misunderstandings

205

5.1 The Double Misunderstanding with Copyleft . . . . . . . . 205
5.2 The Enduring Debate over the Commercial Exploitation ofFree Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Part 3: Free as in … Trapped

235

6 The (Almost) Endless Possibilities of the Free Culture Template247
6.1 Free Software Art Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
6.2 The Source of Free Cultural Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . 259
6.3 Sharing Is Caring but How Many Files Are Enough? . . . . 270
Interlude

280

7 From Techno-Legal Templates to Sandbox Culture285

7.1 Deceptive Participations in a RO/RW Remix Culture . . . . 285
7.2 The Early Days of Mixes Between Operating Systems andSocial Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
7.3 Policies, Jails, Chroot and Sandboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304
Interlude311

8 The Mechanics of Sandbox Culture

316

8.1 A Day in the Sandbox Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316
8.1.1

RjDj . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318

8.1.2

Fuck the System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328

8.2 Fork the System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
8.3 On Forking Homes, Sandboxes and Software Exile . . . . . 354
Conclusion

368

Summary of the Argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
A Model for the Transformation of Art and Cultural Production? 374
Remark on Sandbox Culture and Future Research . . . . . . . . . 379
Appendix: Selection of Proto-Free Culture Licenses

382

References453

List of Illustrations
1.1 UNIX license plate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

32

3.1 Reuse and appropriation between FAL/LAL artists . . . . . 136
4.1 Mattin at make art festival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
4.2 Sita Sings the Blues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
4.3 Snapshots from OSP design process and tools . . . . . . . . 181
4.4 Dépôt marque Française COPYLEFT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
4.5 Fibre Libre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
4.6 CC Ironies (sample from a series of 42) . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
5.1 RIP!: A Remix Manifesto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
5.2 Copyleft (L) sticker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
5.3 Cover of 1985 copy-left issue #3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
6.1 self3[cpu] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
6.2 A maybe free and highly compressed thumbnail . . . . . . 261
6.3 How deep is your source? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
7.1 Community Memory walkthrough . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
8.1 RjDj promotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

ix

In memory of Christine Mansoux

Acknowledgements

Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux,
Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux,
Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux,
Des bisoux, Des bisoux, Des bisoux.
— Philippe Katerine, Des Bisoux

Dušan Barok, Maja Bekan, Casper Bentinck, Paul Brossier, André
Castro, Ana Isabel Carvalho, Ruth Catlow, Jeroen Chabot, Ben Chang,
Constant, Florian Cramer, Yves Degoyon, Annet Dekker, Kevin Driscoll,
Quinn DuPont, Julien Deswaef, Eightycolumn, Bridget Elmer, Andy
Farnell, Laura Fernández, Matthew Fuller, Marcos García, Marc Garrett,Anne Goldenberg, Olga Goriunova, Eleanor Greenhalgh, Dave Griffiths,
Christoph Haag, Jean-Philippe Halgand, Graham Harwood, SachikoHayashi, Claude Heiland-Allen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Don Hopkins,
Kennisland, Danny van der Kleij, Eric Kluitenberg, Kunsthuis SYB,
Anne Laforet, Ricardo Lafuente, Chun Lee, Alexandre Leray, Libre
Graphics Research Unit, Geert Lovink, Alessandro Ludovico, Nicolas
Malevé, Alexia Mansoux, Bernard Mansoux, Christine Mansoux, Mattin,
Chris McCormick, Bonnie Mitchell, Modern Poland Foundation, Antoine
Moreau, Michael Murtaugh, Rob Myers, Sally Jane Norman, Eleonora
Oreggia, Nina Paley, Simon Pummel, Uschi Reiter, Raquel Rennó,
Leslie Robbins, Jaron Rowan, Steve Rushton, Eric Schrijver, servus.at,
Femke Snelting, Manfred Vänçi Stirnemann, Michael Stuz, Bruno Tarin,
Renee Turner, Marloes de Valk, Florian de Valk-Mansoux, Noam de
Valk-Mansoux, Mirko Vidovic, Stéphanie Villayphiou, Dave Young,
Simon Yuill.
Thank you all so much!
xiThis research received financial support from Willem de Kooning
Academy and Research Centre Creating 010 of the Rotterdam Universityof Applied Sciences.
The thesis was written using the following software and operating systems: acme, Debian, evilwm, Firefox, FreeBSD, git, hunspell, jabref, meld,
pandoc, recoll, WordNet, XƎLATEX, zathura, zsh.

xii

Introduction

What Is Free Culture?
According to the website freeculture.org, developed by a “non-partisangroup of students and young people who are working to get their peers
involved in the free culture movement,”1 the term free culture was originally coined by American law professor Lawrence Lessig in his 2004 book
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down
Culture and Control Creativity.2 Lessig’s book is an elaborate collectionof anecdotes, that together form a critique of the increasing discrepancy
between, on the one hand, the way people use technology to share, create, and transform media, and on the other hand, the laws that regulate
and control such activities. He puts an emphasis on digital media files
such as music and films, and notably exemplifies in his analysis the roleand context of piracy in the development of the media industry. Lessig

12Students for Free Culture, “About,” 2006, http://wiki.freeculture.org/About.
Students for Free Culture, “Free Culture,” 2005, http://wiki.freeculture.org/What_is_
free_culture%3F.

xiii

warns the reader of the increasingly negative impact of legal rights suchas copyright on culture, on creativity, and more precisely: on the ability to create and share new productions of different artistic, musical, or
literary creations. In particular, the laws that regulate the intellectual
property aspect of material production have became inadequate to the
production and consumption infrastructure of the Internet.
As British sociologist Dick Hebdige explained in his seminal 1979 book
Subculture: The Meaning of Style, culture is a particularly ambiguous wordthat has been redefined several times, sometimes with contradictions,and that as a whole could be used both to describe processes as well as
products, and relations within the whole way of life as well as standards
for excellence.3 However, the idea of culture that Lessig refers to bares
no ambiguity, and can be best associated to a specific category once defined by Welsh cultural theoretician Raymond Williams, namely “works
and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity,”4 where “culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theatre and film,”5 albeit
taking into account their digital materialisation. However, even if Lessig
refers to the circulation of digital works and cultural expressions on theInternet, the free culture he refers to is not a gratis culture. In his words,
the concept of cultural freedom is tightly linked to liberal traditions, andin the preface of his essay he connects the notion of free culture with theideas of free speech, free markets, free trade, free enterprise, free will,3
4
5

See Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979; repr., London: Routledge,
2002), 5–19, From Culture to Hegemony.
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; repr., New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 90.
Ibid., 90.

xivand free elections,6 to both honour the lineage this term aims to be associated with, and also to note about the linguistic misunderstanding thata term such as free could create. For him, free has nothing to do withgratuitousness and the lack of property.

A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does
this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does soindirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that
follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible fromthe control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything isfree.7After the publication of the book, those who have embraced the ideaof free culture, like the contributors of the freeculture.org website, admitted that since then the original notion might have been changed or
expanded.8 As a matter of fact, the website does not offer one unique definition, but instead points to internal and external resources that could
potentially further inform the reader about how free culture could materialise, what its manifesto could be, and how difficult it is to define it
more clearly.9 Free culture could therefore be claimed by potentially anyone sympathetic to what was sketched by Lessig. In the end, because ofsuch a loose framework, free culture came to be understood as a social

6
7
8
9

Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lockdown Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), XIV.
Ibid., XIV.
Students for Free Culture, “Free Culture.”
See Students for Free Culture, “What Does a Free Culture Look Like?” 2004, http://wiki.freeculture.org/What_does_a_free_culture_look_like%3F; Students for Free
Culture, “Free Culture Manifesto,” 2005, http://wiki.freeculture.org/Free_Culture_
Manifesto; Students for Free Culture, “A Seemingly Simple Question,” 2005, http://wiki.freeculture.org/A_seemingly_simple_question.

xv

movement by some while others described it as a subculture.10
In fact, if Lessig was the first to publish a book on the concept of freeculture, the debate on cultural freedom and cultural activism in the age of
networked collaboration and digital works was much older. Free culturein that sense was the logical next step to what was already anticipated in
the late nineties with the early analysis of copyright regulations over theInternet,11 but was also the first attempt to rationalise an infrastructurein the lineage of the mid-nineties notion of collective intelligence existing over digital networks.12 Indeed, digital cultural freedom resonates
strongly with the idea that access to knowledge and information should
be facilitated, in order to create communal ownership for new idealised
networked societies,13 in which free culture could be both the mechanicalapparatus for the exchange of information, but also a binding element fordifferent groups interested in these issues. So even though free culture
relates to a narrow definition of culture, it must also be understood interms of wider societal concerns such as the “general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development.”14 This allowed free culture to
broaden its cultural scope beyond the exchange and transformation ofdigital works. By existing at these two levels, free culture, in its broad

10

See Mayo Fuster Morell, “Governance of Online Creation Communities: Provisionof Infrastructure for the Building of Digital Commons” (PhD thesis, European University Institute, 2010), 27.
11James Boyle, “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net,”
Duke Law Journal 47 (1997): 87–116.
12
Pierre Lévy, L’intelligence Collective. Pour Une Anthropologie Du Cyberspace (Paris:
La Découverte, 1994); Pierre Lévy, World Philosophie : Le Marché, Le Cyberespace, La
Conscience (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 2000).
13
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, the Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I. (1996; repr., Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).
14
Williams, Keywords, 90.

xvicritique of intellectual property laws, became part, with varying interpretations, of the discourse of several social and political activist efforts.15
Lessig would eventually describe free cultural efforts as inspired by thenotion of cultural environmentalism,16 a term originally coined by Scottish professor of law James Boyle, to illustrate how the model of environmentalist movements raising awareness of ecological disasters, could betransposed to cultural activism’s raising awareness of cultural disasters,
and in particular the enclosure of the public domain.17
In essence, what the free culture generalisation implies is that culture iscurrently not free, it needs to be liberated from those who use intellectual
property laws to control it for their own benefits, and at the same time
limit its circulation as well as transformation. To be more precise—and
this will be more thoroughly explained in this dissertation—regardless of
the long-term intention, this liberation is in practice more of an attempt
to balance more fairly the control over the production and publication ofcultural products, rather than oppose entirely copyright and other intellectual property laws. This balancing is achieved by working around thevery intellectual property laws identified as being the source of the problem, and use them in order to reclaim the way works can be distributed,
used, published, and transformed. Because of the emphasis made by free

15This has been visible notably in the rise of the Pirate Party, see Patrick Burkart, Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014),
and recent discussions on the articulations of political agendas supporting commonsoriented economy and society, see Vasilis Kostakis and Michael Bauwens, Network
Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), where the question of free culture and the commons have joined otherissues and evolved beyond the issue of file sharing.
16
Lawrence Lessig, “Foreword,” Law and Contemporary Problems 70 (2007): 1–3.
17
Boyle, “A Politics of Intellectual Property.”xvii

culture on the legal vessel, it means that in this context there are no differences made between free cultural works themselves: a work of art is nodifferent from a beer recipe. It is up to the practitioner to contextualise
their struggle using generic tools, which are the instructions that I was referring to earlier: the licenses. Licenses are legal documents distributedwith the free work or cultural expression, and these licenses specify what
can be done and under which conditions.18
Free culture offers, in effect, a rather paradoxical form of cultural
freedom: to develop new constraining techno-legal frameworks so
as to liberate cultural production from other constraining techno-legal
frameworks. If this proposal may seems curious at first, scholar Christine
Harold notes however that more radical forms of cultural activism, suchas anti-copyright for instance, are not necessarily a good thing. She uses
two notable analogies, the first is from American activist David Bollier
who argues that the creative process needs an “open white space,”19 andthe second is from Canadian composer John Oswald who states that “ifcreativity is a field, copyright is the fence.”20 From this point Christine
Harold proceeds to argue that fences are not always strict boundaries,
they can be straddled or crossed, reconfigured and be transformed aspart of a democratic process.21 In that sense, she argues that thesefences are not as antithetical to liberated cultural processes as some18

I will return regularly through the course of this thesis in order to explain what these
documents are and how they operate.
19
Christine Harold, OurSpace : Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 154.
20
Ibid., 154.
21
Ibid., 154.

xviii

artists and activists might affirm.22 Furthermore, Harold explains thatsuch “blockages and constraints have always been inextricably linked toinvention” and that “the pirating strategy of ‘theft’, however unwittingly,
perpetuates the very notion of property that it rejects.”23 If Harold also
adds that efforts like Creative Commons—a key project in free culturethat will be discussed several times in this thesis—takes regulations andmarkets very seriously,24 what her fencing counter-argument shows isthat licenses can be a strategic social democratic tools to claim back lost,or protect new, cultural territories.
In fact, the free cultural strategy of playing with fences, was heavily appropriated from free and open source software licensing. Free and open
source software—a collaborative and cooperative mode of software production in which source code is shared—has variously been described asa technological revolution,25 and as a paradigm shift.26 Its cultural significance beyond the realm of software was noted in 2008 by American
scholar Christopher Kelty, who employed the term modulation27 to explain how free and open source practices could be transposed to otherfields. However, signs of such modulation, or cultural diffusion, started
to be visible and articulated very precisely a decade earlier in the late

22

Ibid., 153.
Ibid., 153.
24
Ibid., 145.
25
Tim O’Reilly, “Open Source Paradigm Shift,” in Perspectives on Free and Open Source
Software, ed. Joseph Feller (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
26
To refer to the concept of scientific revolution, originally articulated by Thomas
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; repr., Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012).
27
Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham:
Duke University Pres, 2008).
23

xix

nineties, and at a time where the term free culture was also yet to be introduced, a time I will refer to as the proto-free culture era. Such early
modulations made it so that free culture today is in fact not a speculativemode of production but the tip of an iceberg, made of all sorts of culturalactivism that manifest in the broadest ways possible: from agriculture,28
to terrorism,29 and also physical spiritual practices.30
Discussions around the influence of free and open source software on
art and culture, and more particularly art and culture that involve the useof technology, often revolve around the role of the artist in a networked
community,31 and their relationship with existing free and open source
software communities.32 But other aspects need to be investigated, fromthe engineering advantage of free and open source software both as exceptional artistic tools,33 to the relationship between a proto-free or freecultural license and the work that carries it. The latter in particular, hasbeen given a lot of attention in this research, and connecting the intention of an author with the choice of a license34 will help us understand28

Keith Aoki, “‘Free Seeds, Not Free Beer’: Participatory Plant Breeding , Open Source
Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture,” Fordham Law Review 77(2009): 2275–2310.
29
The AQ Chef and Terr0rist, “Open Source Jihad,” Inspire Summer 1431 (2010): 31–44.
30
Open Source Yoga Unity, “What Are We Doing?” 2005, http://web.archive.org/web/20051023183314/http://www.yogaunity.org/learn/whatwedo.shtml.
31
Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, “Do It with Others (DIWO): Contributory Media in
the Furtherfield Neighbourhood,” in A Handbook for Coding Cultures, ed. Francesca
Da Rimini (Lilyfield: dLux MediaArts Inc., 2007).
32
See Chun Lee, “Art Unlimited: An Investigation into Contemporary Digital Arts andthe Free Software Movement” (PhD thesis, MiddleSex University, 2008).
33
See Marloes de Valk, “Tools to Fight Boredom: FLOSS and GNU/Linux for Artists
Working in the Field of Generative Music and Software Art,” Contemporary Music
Review 28 (2009): 89–101; Martin Howse, “You’ve Got Pluggability,” Tux Deluxe, 2007,
http://web.archive.org/web/20080518065851/http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/254.
34
Lawrence Liang, Guide to Open Content Licenses V1.2 (Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, Institute for Postgraduate Studies; Research, Willem de Kooning Academy,xxwhat happens when free and open source strategies are applied to art andculture production.

Research Question
The impact on cultural production and on practices developed in relation
to the ideas of free and open source software has been both influential
and broadly applied, and for this reason such cultural practices operate
essentially at the tail of the free and open source cultural diffusion. The
consequence of this is that these different free and open source licensing
ideas and their materialisation, might not share so much with the systems
from which they appear to be derived, let alone the fact that such germinal systems are more complicated than they appear to be. The choiceof a free culture license in particular, is not straightforward. There isclear distinction to be made between practitioners consciously constraining their practice around a novel techno-legal system, and those who arepressured under the same system, and that they may have neither chosen to adopt, or have overlooked or misunderstood. The strength of thefree culture proposal to simplify and generalise cultural mechanisms as ashared techno-legal process may also be its biggest weakness. Once theillusion of a lingua franca, that is to say using legal definitions of cultural
movements and objects encoded as licenses, is eroded by a deeper analysis of the intentions of free culture practices, all sorts of dialects may

2005), 57.

xxi

appear, for which the free cultural jargon can only approximate someideas and make compromises. In that sense free culture may not liberate
its practitioners but subjugate them to a particular cultural hegemony,or at the other end of the spectrum, open up possibilities for alternative
rules and control over cultural production for those who can understandexisting and create new techno-legal templates.
Put simply, even though all art and cultural activism inspired by free
and open source software practices, can be quickly placed under the umbrella of free culture, the goal of this research is to demonstrate that art
and culture, connected to the ideas of free and open source software, hasbeen affected in ways that were both unforeseen and different from what
they were believed to do. By looking at how free and open source ideas
have been effectively applied across different groups and contexts, andhow these application overlap or differ, the question I ask is, in which
practical and theoretical ways has free and open source software licensing provided a model of transformation for art and cultural production?

Methodology
I cannot stress enough the importance of the context and scale in which
cultural production occurs in this research, and why this aspect will be
regularly highlighted throughout the whole thesis. To give a brief example: contributors to free software can be presented as members of one
united front in which its participants are bound together by the samexxii

ideology.35 The very existence of a free software movement further reinforces this sense of common direction, and this approach is useful tointroduce such an effort in broad terms. However this comes with highly
problematic strings attached. The infamous historical schism between
free software and open source software, or the difference between copyleft and copyfree licenses provide some of the many examples, which examplify that things are not so simple once looked at more closely. Suchdetails can be easily overshadowed and bring confusion, when associated with the popularity of an encompassing acronym such as Free andOpen Source Software (FOSS), or Free/Libre and Open Source Software(FLOSS). While both of these acronyms clearly attempt to go beyond internal conflicts and aim at consolidating the different parties, so as toengage with greater sets of concerns, like free versus proprietary andopen versus closed, nonetheless in this simplified view, the freeness andopenness of objects become arguably more vague. What such simplifications gain in information compression is counter-balanced by a loss of
its most significant details.
To be sure, the discussion on the difference between free software andopen source software has been exhausted already, however in this research I will show that what is often cited as an example of discourse
discrepancy36 is but one of myriad ideological differences that must be addressed. Things can get particularly murky when the cultural diffusion of35

I will come back in more detail in Chapter 2 on the usage of this term within free andopen source discourse, and also within this thesis.
36
For instance in Brett Gaylor, RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, Film (Montreal: EyeSteelFilm,2008).

xxiii

such simplified principles then triggers new things, like the term free culture, which is both a further generalisation and simplification of previous
software-centric ideas of freedom and openness. As a result, although thepossibility of free and open source appropriation is undeniably a proof of
success, it remains questionable if the resulting different appropriations
actually mean the same thing when attached to different disciplines, orwhen introduced by different groups. If I am interested here, in both
culture as communication,37 and communication as culture,38 what thisjourney into the open mist of free culture could very well highlight is infact, an ode to culture as miscommunication and miscommunication as
culture.
Without close reading and comparison between what a practice is believed to do, how it is articulated ideologically, how it manifests and materialises itself, and finally how such manifestation and materialisationis perceived, there is a risk of providing an incomplete picture. Becauseof that, to investigate the transformative model of free and open source
practices as a whole, one requires a ceaseless analysis of its discourse,
yet one that can only be achieved via an ongoing change of scope, fromthe micro scale to the macro scale and back, so as to limit as much as possible any misinterpretation and inductive generalisation. This difficulty
has so far prevented a comprehensive discussion of the political, artistic, and technological aspects of free culture. Previous efforts to do so

37
38

See Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (1959; repr., New York: Anchor Books, 1990).
See James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (1989;
repr., London: Routledge, 2009).

xxiv

have been limited to advocacy,39 discourse analysis disconnected frompractice,40 a focus on free and open source software communities thatmight not be always representative of their free cultural neighbours,41 orframed from the perspective of a particular ideology.42 To be sure, andconnecting back to the notions of context and scale introduced in thissection, I am not claiming to provide here a research that is a “total view,
and which is able to move effortlessly between scales.”43 I do however
have a particularly involved position of participant observer in this research, that comes from being closely involved in free and open source
inspired art and culture communities for many years, through the production of works of free software art, the curating and organisation of
exhibitions, festivals and conferences, as well as the development of several free and open source software projects,44 and co-editor of the firstanthology on free software and art practices.45 This position gives me arare opportunity to try to provide a more holistic approach. That being

39

Lessig, Free Culture; Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
40
David M. Berry, Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source (London:
Pluto Press, 2008).
41
Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom : The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2013); Kelty, Two Bits.
42
Eben Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant : Free Software and the Death of Copyright,”
First Monday Volume 4 Number 8 (1999), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/
article/view/684/594; Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 63 (Volume 18, Number 2) (2000): 33–58.
43
Anna McCarthy, “From the Ordinary to the Concrete: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scale,” in Questions of Method in Cultural Studies, ed. Mimi White and James
Schwoch (Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
44
For a discussion about these works and projects in relation to free culture see Raquel
Rennó, “Digital Art and Free Culture: Interview with Aymeric Mansoux,” in Tropixel:
Arte, Ciência, Tecnologia E Sociedade, ed. Karla Brunet and Raquel Rennó (Salvador:
Editora da Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2015).
45
Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk, FLOSS+Art (Poitiers: GOTO, 2008).

xxv

said, this thesis is not practice-based or auto-ethnographic, and in thistext I will only very rarely and only anecdotally refer to projects I havebeen involved with. My unusual position helped me however to arrange
semi-structured interviews with practitioners whose work and ideas on
free culture represented the most exemplary proof of diversity. These
interviews occurred by email and face-to-face encounters, with discussions sometimes spread over several years. The semi-structured interviews were used in this thesis either to illustrate or argument an idea, or
as a very specific case-study, in which case I will dedicate a whole section
to them.
In parallel to linking case studies with discourse analysis, I will be using several theoretical frameworks. The purpose of doing so is twofold.
First, this was needed to explore more precisely a particular aspect ofwhat was being discussed at a particular time, for example, the workfrom French semiotician Roland Barthes46 will be useful as a basis to discuss the artistic appropriation of the free cultural discourse, but not so
relevant for other parts of the research. Second, some artists interviewed
during this research articulated their practice in relation to existing theoretical concepts, this was the case for instance with Basque noise musician Mattin, who found inspiration in the writing from German critic
Walter Benjamin.47 In that case, it is useful to partially remain within

46

Roland Barthes, L’Obvie et l’Obtus: Essais Critiques III (Paris: Seuil, 1982); Roland
Barthes, Le Bruissement de La Langue (1984; repr., Paris: Éditions Points, 2015).
47
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid
Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2008); Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility: Second Version,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technologicalxxvi

the same theoretical framework when discussing the artist’s work. Next
to that, I am very much indebted towards the concepts of Gemeinschaft
and Gesellschaft 48 , the iron cage,49 from German Sociologists Ferdinand
Tönnies and Max Weber, respectively, that inspired me to explain how
free software was essentially a constitutive template to emulate communities, and propose the term of sandbox culture to describe free cultural
mechanisms, where software and legal code become a dual liberating
and constraining constituent device for different communities to experience varying ideologies and practices. I also hope that the notion ofcultural sandboxing can contribute a new way to approach and discuss
post-subcultural dynamics, that cannot be easily analysed with existingstatic subcultural models50 in the context of groups that mixes operating systems with social systems. Throughout my writing, I will alsofrequently refer to the notions of radical democracy 51 coined by Argentinian and Belgian political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.
In particular, Mouffe’s later re-articulation of radical democracy as agonistic pluralism,52 will be a crucial theoretical tool used in this thesis to

Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2008).
48
Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society (1887; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
49
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; repr., London:
Routledge, 2005).
50
Geoff Stahl, “Tastefully Renovating Subcultural Theory: Making Space for a New
Model,” in The Post-Subcultures Reader, ed. David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl(Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2003).
51
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985; repr., London: Verso, 2014).
52
Chantal Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Model of Democracy (2000),” in Chantal Mouffe:
Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political, ed. James Martin (London: Routledge, 2013).

xxvii

critically analyse liberal democratic dynamics within proto-free and freeculture communities. Last but not least, in this dissertation the use of theterm culture will often vary. For instance, free culture may be presented
as Lessig’s general ideas on culture production, but it can also looselyrefer more broadly to art and cultural production that offer alternative
to existing copyright frameworks, or on the contrary, free culture may
be very specific to a particular set of licenses. Finally free culture is notnecessarilly a synonym of the free and open source software culture, orthe cultural practices surrounding a particular group. One of the goals of
this dissertation will be to provide a thorough mapping of the different
usage of the term and similar ambivalent ones, the use of the word culture will therefore be always contextualised to clarify its meaning, andto define the modes it adresses.

Limit of the Research
The scope of this research is essentially centred on North-American andEuropean art and cultural production, with some exceptions and relevance notably for Latin American countries. As a consequence, reference to intellectual property laws, practices of sharing and copying, as
well notions of freedom and politics, must be understood strictly withinthese boundaries. If some aspects can be still relevant beyond this scope,
their generalisation might be very risky without considering other factors. For instance the usage of free and open source technology in Africa,
Western and Northern Asia would need to be put in perspective with bothxxviiipostcolonial analysis, the rise of fab labs, and the lack of ethnic and culture diversity in hackerspace communities.53 Similarly, if free and open
source software practices found their way to Eastern Asia, as novel artistic tools,54 or communities,55 it would be difficult to treat art and culture
activism without first looking at the specific relation between art andtechnology in this region of the world, as well as discuss forms of technological openness that are specific to these places, like the shanzhai open
BOM culture , where the list of materials and component assemblies areshared and improved across different manufacturers, following word-ofmouth rules that are policed by the manufacturing communities themselves.56 Finally, the relevance of free and open source principles andpractices, as well as their possible transposition to non-software works
and cultural expressions, must always be contextualised in relation to theintellectual property frameworks they attempt to work around. Their usage and value cannot be decoupled from the way such frameworks aredefined and enforced.57

53

Johannes Grenzfurthner and Frank Apunkt Schneider, “Hacking the Spaces,” 2009,http://www.monochrom.at/hacking-the-spaces/.
54
Seichiro Matsumura, Pd Recipe Book ―Pure Data ではじめるサウンドプログラミ
ング (Tokyo: Bienuenushinsha, 2012).
55
Yahsin Huang, “Openlab Taipei: Connecting the Maker Community,” Medium, 2015,\url{https://medium.com/@yahsinhuangtw/openlab-taipei-connecting-the-makercommunity-611ee54acd9c}.
56
Andrew Huang, “Tech Trend: Shanzhai,” 2009, https://www.bunniestudios.com/
blog/?p=284.
57
Shahee Ilyas, “F/LOSS and the Computer Culture of the Maldives,” in FLOSS+Art, ed.
Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk (London: OpenMute, 2008).

xxix

Structure of the Argument
This thesis is constituted of eight chapters that are organised in threedifferent parts, named after American computer programmer Richard M.
Stallman’s famous attempt to contextualise software freedom in his own
terms:58 free as in speech.59 Between each chapters and parts, small sections presented as interludes are provided to give the reader an overview
of what was recently discussed, announce what will come up next, andreflect as an aside on some of the ideas discussed so far. Generally speaking these bridging sections will also help situate the progress of the argument, and how the material analysed relates to the thesis question.
I chose to divide the thesis in three parts in order to address three subquestions needed to break down the main research question (in which
practical and theoretical ways free and open source software licensing
has provided a model of transformation for art and cultural production):what does make free and open source software relevant to cultural production; what are the relationships between free culture, free art and free
software; and what kind of techno-legal and social systems does free andopen source practice create.
Part one, Free as in… Culture, will answer what makes free and open
source software relevant to cultural production, with the help of the following two chapters: Chapter 1 Paradigm Maintenance and User Freedom58

I will come back to this contextualisation, and explain it in more detail several times
in this thesis.
59
Richard M. Stallman, “What Is Free Software?” 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/
20010516230210/http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

xxx

that will question what is truly revolutionary about free software practices; and Chapter 2 In Search of Pluralism, that will explain how the free
software techno-legal template contributed to shaping both the protofree and free culture eras of culture activism.60
In part two, Free as in… Art, I will discuss the relationships between freeculture, free art and free software. This more precise illustration of how
cultural appropriation operates within free culture will be addressed inthree chapters: Chapter 3 Art Libre, which as the name indicates will trace
the history of Free Art and its license; Chapter 4 The Practice of Free-range
Free Culture, where I will discuss the practice and works of some specificartists and designers; and Chapter 5 Free Cultural Misunderstandings, inwhich notorious misunderstandings in the free culture discourse will be
discussed, in particular the term copyleft and the commercial exploitationof free works and cultural expressions.
Finally in part three, Free as in… Trapped, I will formulate the kindof techno-legal and social systems that free and open source practices
create. I will do so in three chapters: Chapter 6 The (Almost) Endless Possibilities of the Free Culture Template, that will notably explore the limitof transposing software freedom to cultural freedom; in Chapter 7 From
Techno-legal Templates to Sandbox Culture, I will show the mix between
operating systems and social systems is an essential aspect of the freecultural techno-legal template; in the last chapter, Chapter 8 The Mechanics of Sandbox Culture, I will develop further the sandbox analogy as an

60

In this chapter I am proposing the term proto-free to describe ideologies and practices
related to free culture ideologies and practices before their articulation as such.

xxxi

attempt to provide a model that shows how the paradoxes and conflicts
found in free cultural discourses are not just misunderstandings, but arein fact what help sustain these novel forms of production and organisation.

xxxii

Prologue
It’s just past midnight. It’s cold. The air is humid and heavy and smells
like stale beer, in an old World War II bunker built by Russian prisoners
during the German occupation in Bergen, Norway. On a stage, in one of
the biggest rooms of the underground concrete structure, two men, onebald and another wearing beard and hat, ignore the small audience thathas gathered with hesitation around the mess of vinyl, electronics, cables and computers, all of which form an altar at which the two mastersof ceremonies are occupied. Behind them, a video image is projected:
green text scrolls on a black background, the visual layout reminiscentof the popular depiction of computer hacking in nineties films. Slightly
farther away from this enigmatic scene, other human forms gather insmall groups, around dark and sticky wooden tables, or sit alone on thedark and sticky floor, or on the chairs that just happen to have been scattered randomly in the space. Everything is quiet. The surrounding humanoids do not look at the stage. Their attention is focussed on theirlaptop screens. The machines, some of which have seen better days, arecovered with myriad stickers, with each stratum testifying of a particular era and its associated style, together forming a constantly changing
xxxiiipeacock tail for the otherwise dark clothed men and women attending.
And in the darkness of the bunker, their already pale looking faces illuminated by the cold and blueish light of the computer displays, forms acouncil of floating head spectres, a perculiar gathering of radically isolated yet fully connected beings, who only look at each other, when theirchat software stops working. All of a sudden, a sharp and intense sound,or was it a punch, freezes the room. In the tiny moment of sonic vaccum that follows, looks of disbelief, confusion and fear create a brief moment of communion orchestrated by the two noise performers. Adreline
and cortisol is released into the systems of all assembled: fight or flight?
No time to think, their fully alerted animal instinct predicts that anotherbursting charge is about to be delivered, and, like threatened rodents, thefastest promptly take off to the closest holes formed in the dimly lit corridors of the bunker, quickly shouting possible future rallying points toeach other—apparently the hotel lobby near the harbour has free WiFi—
leaving behind only the afterimage of the quickly vacillating tail of a laptop power chord, abruptly pulled from the wall sockets. The very few
left behind, are holding strong to their beer bottles, now absorbing one
sound shock after the other, standing firmly in front of this messy Unix
command line noise mass, hypnotised by the mixed analogue and digital system peacefuly and quietly operated by the two men on stage, andwhose soft, almost unnoticeable manipulations are contrasted with thebrutally tangible manifestation of this human-machine dialogue, thanks
to a merciless amplification.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, in San Francisco, California, USA, a smaller group are quietly gathered in a room. The walls arexxxivpainted matte white with a few salmon pink horizontal stripes at the bottom, some wavy turquoise patterns rise towards the ceiling, in an attempt
to add a Mediterranean tone to the already quite warm studio, artificiallyheated to forty degrees celcius, precisely. Another particular artificiallygenerated feature is the humidity level, which is also precisely set at forty
percent, thus making the atmosphere resonate with some mystical depth
and potential secret meaning, that such a peculiar configuration would
imply. The more prosaic consequences of this apparatus are however ofa lesser spiritual nature: it is just annoyingly hot and humid in there.
Fighting against the stuffiness of such a surreal setup, and the very realodors from the still but sweating bodies, a few sticks of incense bought at
the local Asian supermarket stand proud, slowly burning, and adding an
extra thickness to the already dense misty atmosphere. On a small bench,a brandless music and radio player combo rests on top of a piece of cloth,
decorated with generic embroidery and beads. Both were bought at thesame Asian supermarket. Next to these items, there is a well aligned pileof compact discs, the covers of which, if they would be hung up on a wall,
would form a series of suspiciously happy looking portraits of cheerfulpeople posing with their favourite exotic instruments, interrupted every
now and then, by the odd photography of equally suspiciously beautiful landscapes from improbable holiday destinations. The instructors, awoman and a man, both middle aged, looking fit and tanned, wait for
their cue, the end of one of their favourite tracks in this carefully crafted
playlist: Track 7 The Elder Connections of Mindful Tibet, performed by a
Canadian New Age artist on a synthesizer that sounds something likea Peruvian pan flute, but not quite. When the piece finally ends with axxxv

surprisingly long reverberation mixed with samples of tinkling bells, itis the signal that they need to make their students aware of the changeof pose, the final in a series of twenty six, a closing stance called Kapalbhati in Vajrasana, which is the Sanskrit name for blowing in firm posture.
The moves they just finished are in fact one of the asana sequences thatIndian yoga teacher Bikram Choudhury had attempted to copyright earlier this year and forced several yoga teacher groups to defend in court
their now rogue practice as open source yoga. While quietly whispering
the words of a language that they do not speak or understand, and as thenext music track slowly fades in—this time a multi-layered compositionof mostly monotonal instruments—the group starts an unsynchronised
choregraphy, with each one of the perspiring participants slowly movingfrom the one position to the next. In this last effort of communion andselfless gratitude, signs of relief can be seen on the face of many, now rewarded by the physical effort and the subsequent release of β-Endorphin.
The motion is made more colorful by the visual patchwork constituted by
all the fancy patterns of the leggings, bought at online eco-friendly andfair-trade yoga shops, forming another multitude of peacock tails in frontof equally vivid non-slip mats, also purchased from ethical and fair retailers.
At this exact moment, a few hundreds people marching with petits
fours and sparkling wine in hand, enter the underbelly of the Museumof London, United Kinddom, booked for the night to provide a space for
an important evening dinner. Guided by several well-mannered helpers,
the chatty column of people moves from one room to another, passing archaeological artefacts, interactive and multimedia science related instalxxxvi

lations, and several large panels with big titles, photos, and much smaller
texts. These were created and strategically placed to provide some contextual references and landmarks, so as to testify, in the form of an entertaining and educational tour, of the epic greatness of human civilisation.
Tonight, the visiting sample of such greatness look particularly chic andsmart, with properly selected apperal, accessories and perfume. Most ofthem are holding a little piece of glossy cardboard, on which is printed
their seating position and table number. Indeed, if having the priviledge
to attend a dinner in some of the most impressive rooms of the museum
might sound like an eccentric delight, the true motive of this exclusivegala is business networking. In the same way that the informational
posters have been so particularly placed in the venue, its attendants havealso been carefully placed in advance, strategically grouped around a multitude of small round tables, organised by themes, sectors, or affinities, inthe hope to foster exchange and provide a catalyst for fruitful synergy,
the outcomes of which, who knows, might lead to the need to produce
more museum signage and vitrines in the future. Some of the early birds
from this défilé are quick to take a seat and very keen to start a more active participation in this event. Indeed, while part of those coming to thegala dinner tonight had either paid a generous sum to be present or had
been invited specifically to support the cause, for the rest of the group
however, this peculiar social situation is the conclusion of a long day ofpresentations and panels. During the morning and afternoon conference,
they were exposed to other kinds of peacock tails, in the form of colourful
charts, of all different shapes and forms, and employed to represent andvisualise pretty much anything possible. One of the main narratives ofxxxviithe day was how transparency is a way to create trust in business, andhow it can also be used to make many things more efficient. Furthermore, the makers of such charts were excited to share how the capturing,
calculated publishing and processing of information, digital data to be
more concise, was a paradigm shift that would affect every possible fieldfrom economics to politics, and, of course, the arts, which are represented
here by a few selected works and artists illustrating the coming age of a
new data-driven open culture. The head still buzzing with new visions
from an efficient democracy in which tomorrow’s leaders will have access to the pulse of nations, markets, and literally anything that can be
captured and sampled by machines, they were now all ready to make theuseful connections to turn this dream into reality. With introductions
tuned and optimised for maximum productivity, the clever signpostingof intention, and cunning use of specific keywords, the members of thiselite of data openness, representatives of private and public sector, NGOs,
universities, as well as various organisations, would have been ready tostart their hunt for new business cards, if it were not for the sudden interruption from a man on a podium, who was about to deliver a speech.
The man in his early sixties, can hardly contain his excitment about what
happened today, what is happening now, and what he is sure will definitely happen tomorrow. All around him, several LED displays are blasting numbers: red, yellow, and blue percentages, statistics about births,
death, stock markets, social networks usage, weather reports, and others
that are barely readable due to the speed of the scrolling. When his address is over, the crowd responds with a standing ovation. The starters
are served, finally.
xxxviii

Part 1: Free as in… Culture1

In this first part, I counter two points that have been taken for grantedwith free and open source software production, and the subsequent riseof free culture. The first point is the idea that free and open source software is primarily the opposition to closed source, proprietary, softwareand standards, and this for reasons that can be articulated on the groundsof either ethics or economics. The second point is the notion that all thethings derived from free and open source software are simple variations
on the same theme, and are bound together in a common struggle witha shared intention or agenda, from which every participating group canbenefit. These two elements have led to misunderstandings, or to be more
precise, have prevented an acknowledgement of the tension between different attempts to normalise and rationalise free culture and the richnessof its practices and contexts. In particular, I want to falsify first the notionof free and open source software as a paradigm shift, by showing anotherside of this revolutionary dimension in the fabrication of virtual communities which emulate endangered and speculative practices, and second,demonstrate that the culture of free and open things is a in fact a struggle,
but not against an external hegemony, but a struggle within itself which
is symptomatic of liberal democratic and post-political systems. Each ofthese arguments will be expressed in two chapters: Chapter 1 Paradigm
Maintenance and User Freedom, and Chapter 2 In Search of Pluralism.
At first, the content of these two first chapters might appear like anintroductory textbook on computer programming, and a history of theUnix operating system and free software. It is true that I find it important that some fundamental concepts and key historical elements are firstcovered in this thesis, in order to fully grasp some of the notions that I
2

will develop in the following parts and chapters. However, such a crashcourse is more than a partial survey and summing-up of the literatureon the early days of computational culture and software freedom. For
instance, if I will cover some element of the Unix history, or revisit theschism between free and open source software under the new light ofsource code interpretation, I will skip the era of Unix wars, the infamous
tensions between Microsoft and free and open source software supporters, the introduction of the Linux kernel, and an important part of thelate eighties and nineties as these are irrelevant to the points that I will
be making. As American scholar Christopher Kelty put it, my selection
is in fact a collection of useful narratives1 that I need to defuse the revolutionary dimension of free and open source software, and give a better
sense of the techno-legal constitution of those communities which use
and write software
While doing so, I will argue that free software is indeed connected toa long history of programming practices, and that if there is something
revolutionary about this notion, it is not so much in its fight against closed
and proprietary software, but in the creation of a model, a template ofsorts, to confine, protect, and in fact emulate practices in such a fashionthat it can be appropriated by other groups and individuals. Alongside
this, I will stress that the role and openness of source code should not be
understood only from a technical or legal perspective. I will argue thatsource code interpretation is as much open to software compilers andinterpreters as it is to human beings. The programmatic dimension of free1

See Kelty, Two Bits.

3

software cannot therefore be limited to software production, but need to
be also examined from the perspective of community rules and specificvisions of society, as the clash between free and open source software has
demonstrated.
To build my argument I will first start to question in Chapter 1 thearchetypical subcultural hero rhetoric of the free software tale, then I willshow how the dual openness of source code creates a dual interpretation
by machines and humans from which questions of ethics and economics
arise. Following that I will remind that the development of the computerindustry has been relied extensively on this dual openness, diffusing its
prototyping and engineering culture to the rest of society, I will then explain that the instrumental and questionable role of user generated content and participation in the development of software products is not a
recent issue but is in fact as old as the computer industry. I will argue thatthe most interesting aspect of the appearance of free software has been
its ability to prototype a framework relying on a definitions and a few
licenses, in order to protect or amplify some aspect of this legacy. However, in the process this form of emulation has opened the door to others
to also use such a strategy to put forth their own ideology. This aspect
will be discussed in Chapter 2, in particular how the definition-license
template became attractive outside of the realm of software, suddenly expanding free software to afford several attempts to generalise it under
different forms, such as open content, free knowledge, and eventually freeculture. However, I will show that this process of cultural diffusion is thestage of two opposing forces—a sort of cultural entropy challenged byvarious efforts to contain and define culture freedom more precisely—4

that are reminiscent of liberal democracy dynamics. Finally, using open
design and the makers movement, I will discuss what becomes of thecounter-hegemonic potential of free culture, the pluralism and the wide
diversity of ideologies that appropriated the free software template, once
cultural freedom becomes defined and generalised for all sorts of works
and cultural expressions.

5Chapter 1
Paradigm Maintenance andUser Freedom

1.1

Questioning the Revolution

As with many folk tales, the archetypical free software stories often begin,1 with the presentation of its protagonist within the landscape inwhich their quest will unfold. Similar to the first narrative function from
the Morphology of the Folktale,2 such tales start with the absentation3 of
the hero, as he leaves the growing proprietary operating systems of an
expanding computer industry which is becoming increasingly reliant on

1
2
3

Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning…was the Command Line (1999; repr., New York:
HarperCollins e-books, 2007), 34.
Vladimir J. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928; repr., Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2010).
Ibid., 26.

6

intellectual property laws: from copyrights, to patents, trademarks, trade
secrets, and industrial design rights. Very much at the opposite of thesejust working and plug and play software environments—championed in
the context of such tales by American multinational corporations like Apple and Microsoft—the userland4 our hero seeks seem to be less driven
by technological consumerism. Most importantly, it is articulated arounda strange concept: the freedom of the user. In fact, according to themyths, the claim of our visionary hero is that there exists, somewhere,a ground of liberation where people share their work and their tools.
They could be helping each other, building together creative and productive software frameworks and be active members of many autonomous,
partly-federated and decentralised, technological user groups that would
form one united community and fuel this extraordinary collective effort.
The project’s purpose is grandiose and the founder of this new world
aims to build a better society, one Unix command at a time.
This man is American computer programmer Richard M. Stallman.
The call to join his quest, the 1985 GNU Manifesto,5 will be read and discussed in many computer journals, newsgroups and bulletin boards. The
document promises nothing less than a prophetic paradise for computer
programmers. Moreover, Stallman’s writing is a commitment to create
a whole new society based on the development of something called free45

In reference to the Unix centric term that designates the virtual memory space outside of the kernel, and generally occupied by user mode programs and libraries running in an operating system. See Eric S. Raymond and Guy L. Steele, “THE JARGON
FILE, VERSION 2.2.1,” 1990, http://catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg221.txt.
Richard M. Stallman, “The GNU Manifesto,” Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Software Tools Volume 10, Number 3 (1985): 30–35.

7

software, and the society he envisions is defined by post-scarcity economics, a concept that describes “economic and political systems where
goods are freely distributed according to egalitarian principles,”6 andwhich historical antecedents can be found in various economic theoriesof the first half of the twentieth century, from mutualism to automation
and robotics, and further adopted in both left and right-wing literature.7
However, Stallman’s approach is not driven solely by economics ortechnological positivism, it is guided by ethical motives:

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I
must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want
to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not
to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users inthis way. I cannot in good conscience sign a non-disclosure agreement or a software license agreement. […] So that I can continue
to use computers without dishonour, I have decided to put togethera sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along
without any software that is not free. […] In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where
nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People
will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as
programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week onrequired tasks such as legislation, family counselling, robot repair,
and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to makea living from programming8

It is on such premises, that the birth of the free software movement isoften presented. Beginning from a one person stand, a singular position
which became a universal matter, as testified by the innumerable free and678Michael Peters, “Introduction: Knowledge Goods, the Primacy of Ideas and the Economics of Abundance,” in Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy, ed. Simon
Marginson Michael Peters and Peter Murphy (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 11.
For a broad genealogical overview of the term see ibid., 11–12.
Stallman, “The GNU Manifesto.”8

open things that emerged from the mid-nineties—some of which I will
discuss in Chapter 2—and remain a given in software production to thisday. This transformation has made American publisher and open source
evangelist Tim O’Reilly, associate this process with American physicist
Thomas Kuhn’s concept of the paradigm shift,9 where the scientific world
view of the many will eventually be changed by the means of gradualconversion.10 For instance, in the 2001 documentary Revolution OS, sucha shift is exemplified with the tension between Microsoft Windows andthe GNU/Linux operating systems, and how the supporters of the latterare presented as active participants of a revolution that impacts both thesoftware industry and computational culture in general.11
This narration is in fact emblematic of the free and open source stories,
combining the thematic of revolutionary science with a loose interpretation of social revolution, by the means of a near Hollywoodian variationof the fight between David and Goliath, which fits particularly well withthe hero rhetoric of subcultural theory,12 and provides the reason free
and open source software has often been designated as such.13 If such accounts have been instrumental in fuelling the opposition between the cultural diktat of the nineties computer industry, and the desire for a more

9

See O’Reilly, “Open Source Paradigm Shift.”
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 151–57.
11
See J.T.S. Moore, Revolution OS: Hackers, Programmers & Rebels UNITE!, Film (US:
Wonderview Productions, 2002).
12
Stahl, “Tastefully Renovating Subcultural Theory.”
13
See Marianne van den Boomen and Mirko Tobias Schäfer, “Will the Revolution Be
Open-Sourced? How Open Source Travels Through Society,” in How Open Is the
Future?:Economic, Social & Cultural Scenarios Inspired by Free & Open-Source Software,ed. Marleen Wynants and Jan Cornelis (Brussels: VUB Brussels University Press,
2005), 31–68.

10

9diverse and independent computational culture, and if it is also undeniable that different practices emerged and were inspired by this struggle,14
it is however a very crude simplification.
The GNU Manifesto and free software have became emblematic andinstrumental in the “explosion in variations”15 of the word open, a model
to be followed not just for software but for pretty much everything andin which “openness breeds more openness.”16 In this case the gradualconversion mechanism of the scientific revolution has been reduced toa fashionable adjective to put next to virtually anything, and it is worth
asking whether or not free and open source software offered a new single world view, or triggerred instead a plethora of new world views. This
makes general analysis particularly difficult. For instance, the marketing of open source by O’Reilly has been recently criticised by Belarusian
writer Evgeny Morozov.17 However, by giving too much importance tothe publisher in his critique, Morozov ended up making an approximative generalisation from only one particular aspect of the free and open
source software history. His focus on dismantling what he refers to as
the open source meme-engineering, distracts him from seeing that the revolutionary dimension of free software, a perspective that he supports, isequally questionable and prone to be dismantled as well. Even though
Morozov succeeds in taking apart the image constructed by O’Reilly, he

14This aspect will be one of the central points in the second part of the thesis.
Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek, “Fifty Shades of Open,” First Monday 21, no. 5(2016).
16
Ibid.
17
Evgeny Morozov, “The Meme Hustler: Tim O’Reilly’s Crazy Talk,” The Baffler, 2013,https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler.
15

10

leaves Stallman’s image in line with that of the origin myth, in which
Stallman is presented as a leader of a radical social movement, offering
an alternative to proprietary Unix and Windows operating systems.
This narrative has been constructed over the years as much by free software supporters as by their opponents, as I will show on several occasions
throughout this thesis. Free software is in fact not a creatio ex nihilo, andStallman and historians of computer science have always been very clear
about this when explaining that software was always free,18 an aspect often overlooked but crucial in the first part of this thesis, and this is why
I will often use the term emulation to describe free software practices.
However, before unpacking what I mean by this, it is necessary to first
explain the freedom Stallman is referring to, as well as the users’ freedom,
often cited in the free software discourses.19

1.2

Source Code and the Individuation of theProgrammer

So, what exactly is this users’ freedom about and how does it relate to
the production and distribution of software? To tackle these questions,
I first want to decouple the idea of liberating users from understanding
how software is written. Once some trivial technical knowledge of pro-18

Joaquín Seoane Pascual Jesús M. González-Barahona and Gregorio Robles, Introduction to Free Sotfware (Barcelona: Fundació per a la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya,2009), 2.1 Free Software before Free Software.
19Free Software Foundation, “What Is Free Software,” 2016, https://www.gnu.org/
philosophy/free-sw.en.html.

11

gramming and source code is explained, free software is in fact a rather
simple idea to comprehend. Source code specifically is an essential aspectof software production. Understanding how it is written and publishedallows us to see very concretely how regulating its access can impact
users: from total alienation and control, to the empowering liberation of
Stallman’s manifesto.20
As a program part, source code, and to be more precise the source files,
is the collection of computer instructions written using some human readable computer language, such as C or Python. Source files can be compiled, like C, which means that the source code is translated by a compiler
into machine code, that can be executed manually to perform some tasks
as a standalone program, or as part of a larger software.21 Some files canalso be interpreted, like with Python code, in which case the source codeis both translated and executed on the fly by a piece of software called
an interpreter, by alternating reading of the source files and performing
the requested computation.22 As the name implies, source code is where
everything starts. As I will trivially demonstrate below, its role in the
production of software is technically essential, and its access therefore allows unrestricted modification of its function, whether it is about adding,removing features, or simply fixing faults.

20

The importance of source code is also a prerequisite to test later on, in the third partof this thesis, the limits of a generalised free culture, especially in cultural expression
where source code is either irrelevant, undefined, or metaphorical.
21
See Samuel P. Harbison III and Guy L. Steele Jr., C: A Reference Manual (1984; repr.,
Prentice Hall, 2002), Introduction.
22
See Allan Downey, Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (2012; repr.,
Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2016), Chapter 1.

12

To give a concrete example, let’s consider the following piece of plain
text written by user Ada, and stored in the source file software.c:#include <stdio.h>
int main(void){
printf(”There is software.\n”);}

This text is the source code of a very simple program written in a programming language called C. It does not do much for now because it isdescribed in this particular human readable language, and not as machine
language. The latter is the set of instructions that can be executed by acomputer’s central processing unit (CPU), the object code, that can eventually become an executable program. To translate the text above intosuch a file, and as mentioned previously, Ada needs another program, acompiler, such as the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). On a Unix-likesystem, this operation can be performed by typing the following command on the computer terminal:23

gcc software.c -o software

Upon pressing the Enter key, the compiler is called and then translates
software.c into software. If there are no errors in the source code, thiscommand line operation should yield nothing at all, and there should23

The terminal is nowadays a software application, once born as hardware device, andwhich provides a means to interact with the operating system in a textual way.

13

now be two files in the folder from which it was executed: software.c,the original C source file from Ada, and a new file named software, thetranslation of the source code into object code. This object code is a software itself,24 in this case an executable computer program that can be run
by Ada from the terminal, like this:./software

The result of this execution, as hinted by the venerable printf C function in the source code, is the sudden display on the terminal of the stringof text There is software. At this point, the source file could very well
be discarded or deleted. It does not matter for the software, which will
still be running as long as the user has the object code file.25
In a way, software is born by bringing its source file to the altar of compilation, and this transitional characteristic is the reason why media theorist Wendy Chun describes source code as a spectral thing, a re-sourcethat only becomes source through its destruction.26 However, limiting
source code to a mere re-source is problematic. Once the dimension of
distributed and cooperative writing is taken into account, this view isin fact incomplete. Indeed, the spectrality of source code becomes increasingly questionable once the distribution and publishing of these files

24

For a brief genealogy of the term, see Matthew Fuller, Software Studies : A Lexicon(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), Introduction, the Stuff of Software.
25
This is true as long as the software and hardware environments, and the libraries
the software is linked to, are unchanged. Of course. I hope programmers, and thoseworking on the conservation of computational culture, will forgive me for an approximation made in order to keep things relatively simple in this example.
26
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2011), 24–25.

14

comes about. Going back to the example, let’s assume that Ada’s program
is so useful, that she decides to share it with other users on the same platform. To do so, Ada has two options. She can either distribute the source
file, in which case the other users will have to compile it themselves, or
she can just give the executable program, so that users only have to run
the software.
First, let’s see what happens if she distributes the source filesoftware.c. In our hypothetical userland, she gives the source code touser Friedrich. But Friedrich is partly dissatisfied with what he reads inthe file and decides to slightly modify it before the compilation:#include <stdio.h>
int
main(void){
printf(”There is no software.\n”);}

In order to create the executable code, he then runs a similar commandto the one typed by Ada, however this time using a different C compiler:clang software.c -o software

The output is like GCC in the sense that two files are now present,
software.c and software, with the difference that if Friedrich runs his

software, it will now print on the terminal display the following text:
There is no software.

15

Practically speaking, and simplifying a bit, we can say that the software that has been created here has now two branches: Ada’s version
and Friedrich’s version. Each presents a particular viewpoint, thinking,state of development, implementation, or feature, that is meaningfulfor its user. Programming is not just problem solving and computerscientists have early on described it as a literary practice27 where
the thoughts, algorithmic vision, and sensibility of the programmer
author, turns source code into a medium to express more than efficient
problem solving.28 If, according to American computer scientist Joseph
Weizenbaum, compulsive programmers are absorbed in a self reflective
conversation with their computers, where they build worlds of theirown making and in which the machine challenges their power,29 sourcecode is therefore much more than an undead spectre: it is the vessel ofthe computer as a psychopomp.30 Thus compilation is in fact a rite ofpassage, that connects the programmer’s Ego and their Self, and whichfragments of the latter are now captured as software, as part of a process

27

Donald Ervin Knuth, Literate Programming (Stanford: CSLI, 1992), Computer Programming as an Art.
28
For a more thorough discussion of this matter, see Geoff Cox and Alex McLean,
Speaking Code : Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression (Cambridge: MIT Press,2013), 7–11.
29
Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976), 119.
30
I use here the term psychopomp, both in a mythological and Jungian sense, see Carl
Gustav Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959). After all, it is common to anthropomorphise computers, or consider them as anima and animus, which is why I believe they can perfectly fulfil
their psychopompus role in the technologically alienating society. I will explain in
Chapter 2 how the process of individuation is particularly visible in the field of open
design.

16

of individuation.31
Even though the compilation of executable code as a by-product ofcompilation and interpretation is a task that may be completed, the writing of source code files is something that has the potential to never befinished. In fact, and from the perspective of semiotics,32 despite the apparent closedness of the deterministic translation layers present in programming, I can see two fundamental levels of openness in source code
as a literary work. First, the source code is an open text for the different
software readers which will interpret it more or less differently, leading
to the production of different binaries. Different C compilers, no matter
how simple the source code is, will indeed produce different object code,
therefore introducing internal changes in the executable program. As aresult, the programs produced will perform slightly differently depending on the parsing and translation of the source files.33 Second, the sourcecode is an open text for the different human readers who will interpret

31

In that regard, today’s concerns about a singular software and algorithmic driven
dystopia can be best described as the disruption of the process of individuation of
the software user, by the (en)coded social imaginary of programmers and those employing them.
32
And more particularly in connection to Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
33
A risky but useful analogy nonetheless, can be made with the translation of an essay,
from one source language to another, and for which the meaning must be of course
preserved. It is easy to assume that different translators will produce different wording and introduce their own subtleties, yet hopefully the resulting essays should intheory convey the same meaning to the readers, and not betray the original intentionof the translated author. Similarly, different C compilers will translate source code
into object code with their own assemblage of instructions, while still producing, it ishoped, the same expected functionality for the user. The differences between GCC
and Clang cited here are obviously both negligible and irrelevant with the sourcecode examples that I give here. The impact of these deviations belong to discussions
on the benchmarking of compilation time and execution performance, critical for the
making of large software suites or cycle intensive computations, and well outside of
the scope of this text.

17

differently its significance, value, aesthetics.
If the immediate consequence of this difference of interpretations between humans and machines, can contribute in the most trivial way tothe manifestation of software malfunctions, but also allows for sourcecode obfuscation34 and deceptive executions,35 it also shows that source
files and their interpretation are central in this process of individuation.
For instance, for my explanations of compilation I have purposefully used
two different C compilers, the source code of which are in fact available
under different free software licenses. GCC uses a copyleft license andClang relies on permissive licensing, that can be on some occasion associated to copyfree or copycenter licensing. I will not enter into the detailsof these forms of licensing just yet, for now I will just mention that theseare fundamentally opposed approaches to free and open source software
licensing. When Friedrich selects Clang instead of GCC, it might not justbe for the different interpretation and parsing quality of the compiler, it
could simply be guided by an ethical or economical belief which leads him
to avoid copyleft software, regardless of the license of the software he iscompiling and writing. By picking up a specific software compiler here,
the choice is not based on the compiler executable code, but on the imaginary provided by the compiler source code and its legal function. The
resulting compiled software can never be disconnected from this process,it inherits a permanent coloration from both its objective and subjective

34

See Simon Cooper Leo Broukhis and Landon Curt Noll, “The International Obfuscated C Code Contest,” 2016, http://www.ioccc.org/.
35
See Scott Craver, “The Underhanded C Contest,” 2016, http://www.underhanded-c.
org.

18

interpretations.36

1.3

Engineering Freedom and User Groups

Previously, I made the point that free software was presented as the trigger that led towards an explosion of variations of the word open. However as I have shown with the dual openness of source code and the issue
of interpretation, it is not so much that free software per se is at the origin
of such divergences, but more that it made visible a pre-existing sourcecode différance.37 Similarly, and as I will develop in this section, the muchchanted cooperative mechanism of free and open source software,38 finds
its roots in the very birth of the computer industry, against which free andopen source software have been presented as alternatives.39 The idea ofan active contribution to a shared body of technical knowledge is indeed
nothing new. It is the direct legacy of academic research and engineering traditions, where the access and contribution to existing knowledge
have to be facilitated in one way or another, so as to ease innovationand improve efficiency, a process well known with manufacturing blue

36

This issue can be quickly exemplified with the case of the FreeBSD operating systemdeprecating GCC in favour of Clang. See The FreeBSD wiki contributors, “GPL Software in the Base System,” 2017, https://wiki.freebsd.org/GPLinBase; Eric S. Raymond,“Re: Clang Vs Free Software,” 23 January 2014, https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/
msg00209.html; Richard M. Stallman, “Re: Clang Vs Free Software,” 24 January 2014,
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html.
37
In reference to Jacques Derrida, Marges de La Philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit,1972), La Différance.
38
Notably articulated in Yochai Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan: The Triumphof Cooperation over Self-Interest (New York: Crown Business, 2011).
39
Stephenson, In the Beginning…was the Command Line.

19

prints.40 In particular, the second form of openness combined with writing access, means that source code is constantly open for changes. It has
the potential to be a human driven evolutionary assemblage of text,41that can through time be modified and enhanced,42 to always improve
the previous version, to always aim for something final and superior, yetalways superseded by better solutions and alternatives: a never ending
prototyping quest.
This collaborative and cooperative prototyping culture has in fact beensubservient to the development of the computer industry in the middleof the twentieth century. At the time, mainframe computer customers
needed to develop their own tools in order to write programs. This naturally led to duplicate efforts as some of the steps and assemblers developed in the process were similar enough across the different customers
applications. The reason why computer hardware manufacturers, suchas IBM, were able to expand their business in the nineteen fifties, wasspecifically connected with the attempt to promote collaboration and cooperation between customers, and also with the corporation building themachines.43

40Mark A. Lemley and David W. O’Brien, “Encouraging Software Reuse,” Stanford Law
Review 49, no. 2 (1997): 255–304.
41
See Diomidis Spinellis, “A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution,” MSR ’15:
Proceedings of the 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, 2015,
462–65.
42
I’ll purposefully keep the quines, the emerging properties of cellular automata, as
well as self-documenting and self-generating software outside of the discussion, as
they are more exceptions than generalised rules on the production of software. At
least it is still the case today in our humble pre-singularity times, where the evolutionary nature of software still heavily depends on a metaphorical form of commensalismwith human beings.
43
See Atsushi Akera, “Voluntarism and the Fruits of Collaboration: The IBM User
Group, Share,” Technology and Culture 42, no. 4 (2001): 710–36.

20

It is of course outside the scope of this research to provide an extensive history of computation. However, I must mention that the advancedescribed here has been essentially accelerated by the introduction ofgeneral purpose computation and programming.44 Unlike the first generation computers which were literally wired to solve one specific set ofproblems, with the programming of general purpose computers it also
became possible to share these programs with others, and arrange theprograms to work with other programs. From this point on, new kindsof software emerged and were named from this growth, most notably the44

Such reflection on general purpose computation is best illustrated in the 1936 paperon the Entscheidungsproblem by British mathematician Alan Turing ( Alan Mathison
Turing, “On Computable Numbers : With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 42 (1936): 230–65), and followed
in 1945 in a draft report from Austrian-Hungarian born American mathematician
John von Neumann ( John von Neumann, “First Draft of a Report on the Edvac,”
Report (University of Pennsylvania, 1945)). By introducing the idea of general purpose computation and facilitating the storing of programs running on the former,
computation would no longer be perceived as the result of extensive and dedicatedelectronic engineering, but by a combination of two, possibly three parts: the hardware, the data, and the programs, which would be much later on be referred to as
software. The case of what will be eventually known as the von Neumann architecture is often portrayed popularly as seminal work in the development of the personal
computer (see Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of MindExpanding Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), Chapter 4). However, at thetime of the draft’s circulation, the whole field of computing already pointed towards
the design of general purpose computers. For instance the 1944 relay based IBM
Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), also known as Mark I, conceptualised by computer pioneer Howard Aiken, built by IBM engineers, and used by
von Neumann himself during the Manhattan project, led to the Harvard architecturethat differed from the von Neumann architecture in the way data and instruction
did not share the same memory space. For a detailed historical overview of the now
forgotten work of Aiken during the era of the first general purpose computers, see
I. Bernard Cohen, Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1999). Today’s computers are effectively variations and mixes of both Harvard
and von Neumann architectures. As for the concept of programming discussed here,
it is essentially the latest iteration of a long legacy of rationalist computational culture that can be traced back to Leibniz’s symbolic logic. See Florian Cramer, Words
Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination (Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, Institute for
Postgraduate Studies; Research, Willem de Kooning Academy, 2005); Martin Davis,
Engines of Logic : Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer (New York: Norton,
2000)

21

programs that help manage other programs like the operating system andits utilities. The so-called user-friendliness of desktop metaphors that istaken for granted today with popular OS such as Windows and MacOS,45
as much as the so-called transparency and ubiquity of the user interface(UI) and experience (UX) of tomorrow’s latest pervasive and smart calm
technology,46 was in fact non existent in the early days of programming.
An operating system then merely represented the most barebones environment and framework to make more programs.
Now where to find programmers? This was the last problem the risingcomputer industry had to solve in order to facilitate a wider adoption of
their prototyping and solutionist culture. So in practice, the creation ofcommunities of code sharing computer users provided a very pragmatic
answer to the problem faced by this industry, namely the need to educate as quickly as possible the growing numbers of operators of this earlymass-produced novel canvas of computational wonders. Said differently,
the industry needed its clientèle to become programmers and participate
in the shared exploration of software and general computation. Therefore, in a time where no customer support existed, and where university
curricula on programming were in their infancy,47 the creation of a col-45

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom : Power and Paranoia in the Age ofFiber Optics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 22–23.
46
See Amber Case, Calm Technology: Principles and Patterns for Non-Intrusive Design(Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2015); Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, “Designing Calm
Technology,” POWERGRID JOURNAL 1 (1996).
47
Professor of the history of science I. Bernard Cohen credits Howard Aiken, from theMark I fame, for being the first to start an academic program about computation
at Harvard in 1947, a “one-year program leading to a Master of Science degree inapplied mathematics with special reference to computing machinery”. See Cohen,
Howard Aiken, 186.

22

laborative learning and semi autonomous problem solving groups was
the best way to disseminate, acquire, and improve knowledge about general purpose computation, as shown with the very appropriately named
SHARE user group.48 The latter, created in 1955, was backed up by IBM,49
which benefited directly from strongly encouraging the customers of its
701 and 704 systems to meet, share their problems and solutions, while financially supporting the user group infrastructure.50 In parallel with the
emergence of these corporate sponsored communities of users, anotherimportant change hit computer science, and added yet another social dimension to the use and sharing of computer software: time-sharing.
Introduced in the late nineteen fifties, time-sharing enables the sharing of computation time amongst several users, so that one person does
not have to wait for someone else’s calculation to complete on a mainframe computer before starting their own.51 In the nineteen sixties, andcombined with the increasing exchange and writing of programs within
specialised user groups, this idea became both central and instrumental
in taking computation outside of its academic communities, aiming to
finally make relevant its existence for society as a whole.
In the context of the 1963 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

48

Edmund Humenberger Carlo Daffara Jesús M. González-Barahona and Ben Laurie.,“Free Software/Open Source: Information Society Opportunities for Europe?” Report (Working group on Libre Software, 2000), 38.
49
Akera, “Voluntarism and the Fruits of Collaboration.”
50
Peter H. Salus, The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin : How Free and Open Source
Software Is Changing the World (2004; repr., US: Reed Media Services, 2008), Ancient
History.
51
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of theInternet (1996; repr., New York: Touchstone, 1998), 25.

23

(DARPA) funded project on Multiple-Access Computer, or Machine Aided
Cognitions (MAC), Italian-American computer scientist Robert M. Fano
explained the underlying principles of what he would describe as thecomputer utility approach:52
The principal aim is to develop and investigate experimentally a new
way in which computers can aid more effectively people in their creative work, in their thinking, in any field, from research, to engineering design, management, education, and so forth […].
[T]he user does not have to instruct the computer on how to do
everything that he wants to get done, but only the parts that arevery special and very new to the problem which is concerned atthat time. Many facilities are already available and stored within
the system, so that in a sense each individual has available, literally
at his finger tips, the work of many people that have preceded him.
In a very real sense, the computer system, that we are just barely
beginning to develop, will contain what amounts to a library. A
library that is available to every user of the system.53

The breakthrough of the library was in fact dual. Firstly, the libraries
of software understood as a collection of executable programs, and secondly, the early sixties computer concept that is the software library—aparticular software component the functionalities of which can be accessible by executable programs—therefore allowing the development of applications reusing and sharing the same pool of system and user libraries.
If you look again at Ada or Friedrich’s source code in section 1.2, thefunction printf used to display text on their terminals is not a magicalword. It is part of the core input and output functions of the C standard

52

See Robert M. Fano, “The MAC System: The Computer Utility Approach,” IEEE Spectrum January (1965): 56–64.
53
Mornski, Robert Fano Explains Scientific Computing (1964), Online video (San Bruno:
YouTube, 2009), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjnmcKVnLi0.

24library, and the declaration of the former is provided by the stdio.h standard header file, hence the need for Ada and Friedrich to #include thelatter at the beginning of their source code, so that the compiler can findit. In essence, the thought of a software library is close to the concept
in which users are sharing and recombining several existing software for
their own needs.54 The difference here is that modularity is echoed at amuch lower level.
These two forms of library are nowadays taken for granted in multitasking and multi-users environments, regardless of the operating system, closed source or open source. But in the nineteen seventies, thistransformation contributed to the slow extinction of the large mainframe
dinosaurs, in favour of more versatile, smaller and generic computers, for54

To give an analogy, with some strings attached given the issue of material goods
scarcity, using several libraries and bits of existing source code to make a new program, could be seen as similar to using existing techniques, already available kitchen
appliances, as well as raw and processed ingredients, in order to make a new apple pie instead of attempting to make one truly from scratch. But this notion of
doing something from scratch is of course deceptively relative to the environment
in which things are made. Similar to astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s famous tongue-incheek comment about the latter—“if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, youmust first invent the universe” (in Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House,1980), p. 218)—the general purpose computer, its operating system, and existing utilities and libraries, offer a fantastic head start in the making of new programs andthe sharing of files. For instance, in terms of openness and from the viewpoint ofinteroperability, one of the software that I used to write this thesis, namely pandoc,
is able to export my text to several other markup languages and file formats that canbe read by other applications closed source or not, thanks to a family of libraries thatare able to implement open standards without the need to share code. Similarly, but
at another level, given the plethora of software libraries available today to provide
out of the box all sorts of functionalities, from drawing the Graphical User Interface(GUI) to spell checking, network file access and file system support across several
types of computer architectures, I could also have programmed my own exporting
software from scratch and only focused on specific features and interactions, not already present in the hundreds of software libraries at my disposal on a free software
operating system, or I could have decided to procrastinate the writing of this dissertation even further and instead write the software from scratch yet using an alreadyavailable programming language and its compiler or interpreter. Etc.

25

which interoperability and the portability of software were essential survival traits. In this race, a clear winner quickly emerged to dominate
the late seventies universities, corporations and government agencies:
Unix.55

1.4

UNIX Connects the Dots, People andPipelines

Unix was born from the 1964 Multiplexed Information and Computing
Service (MULTICS) project, one of the earliest time-sharing mainframe
operating systems. Put simply, the aim of the project was to turn computation into a productive and efficient technology. As American softwaredeveloper and open source software advocate Eric S. Raymond describedsome years later, the purpose of MULTICS was to hide the complexityof the operating system from users and programmers, “so that more real
work could get done.”56 The project was the outcome of a cooperation between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), General Electric,
Project MAC, and Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs). But in 1969,
Bell Labs stopped its involvement, dissatisfied with the progress madeso far, leaving its employees involved at loose ends. Still, these employees, computer engineers and programmers Doug McIlroy, Dennis Ritchie

55

Christos J. P. Moschovitis, History of the Internet: A Chronology, 1843 to the Present(Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1999).
56
Eric S. Raymond, “A Brief History of Hackerdom,” in Open Sources: Voices from theOpen Source Revolution, ed. Sam Ockman Chris Dibona and Mark Stone (Sebastopol:
O’Reilly, 1999), 29.

26

and Ken Thompson, were eager to explore further some of the MULTICS
ideas, and proceeded to do so within the constraint of a smaller budget,and as a consequence were compelled to use smaller and simpler computers.57
So despite the fact that the original name of Unix58 was the Uniplexed
Operating and Computing System (UNICS), which can easily be read as amocking reference to the much larger MULTICS operating system,59 the1970 UNICS operating system was in fact not as reactionary as it may
seem. Its ethos as a simplified design mostly came from the more limited
technical environment available at Bell Labs, combined with the desire tobuild “neat small things, instead of grandiose ones.”60 But this trait soon
became a major advantage. The operating system gained popularity fortechnically implementing the idea of an ever expanding toolbox, a cornucopia of prototypes, workflows, usage, yet to be discovered in the manyextensions and permutations of its original design. The modular natureof the operating system, as envisioned with Project MAC and its notionsof library and the computer utility, turned out to be the flagship of Unix
which soon became the best Lego bricks set available to lower the accessibility threshold of computer programming.61 If the idea of software li-

57

Salus, The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin, UNIX.
Nobody seems to remember who spelled it like this and why it was changed. See
Aleksey Dolya, “Interview with Brian Kernighan,” Linux Journal, 2003, https://www.
linuxjournal.com/article/7035; Peter H. Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX (Reading:
Addison-Wesley, 1994), 9.
59
Eric S. Raymond, The Art of UNIX Programming (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2004), 31.
60
Quote from author of the C programming language, and important UNIX contributor,
American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, in Salus, The Daemon, the Gnu, and thePenguin, 15.
61
The analogy between Lego bricks and Unix-like systems, and eventually free andopen source software, is quite popular. It seems to stem from the early nineteen
58

27braries and libraries of software, that grew from the sudden opportunities
provided by time-sharing and the necessary creation of user groups, is
not a Unix invention, what made it stand out nonetheless was the simple
implementation and inter-operability of such concepts.

[Unix] attack the accidental difficulties that result from using individual programs together, by providing integrated libraries, unified
file formats, and pipes and filters. As a result, conceptual structuresthat in principle could always call, feed, and use one another can indeed easily do so in practice. This breakthrough in turn stimulated
the development of whole toolbenches, since each new tool could beapplied to any programs that used the standard formats.62

What is striking here is how the idea of standing on the shoulders ofgiants, is equally present in the way source code can be assembled andmodified from different parts, and the way the resulting binaries can be
combined with each other. This approach eventually sparks what would
latter be coined as the Unix philosophy:

Although that philosophy can’t be written down in a single sentence, at its heart is the idea that the power of a system comes
more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves. Many UNIX programs do quite trivial things inisolation, but, combined with other programs, become general anduseful tools.63

nineties which saw increasing references of the toy in scientific literature, to describe modular and reusable technical components. In the case of Unix, it wasused notably in Thomas Scoville, “The Elements of Style: UNIX as Literature,” Performance Computing September (1998), http://web.archive.org/web/19990203202734/
http://www.performancecomputing.com/features/9809of1.shtml.
62
Frederick P. Brooks Jr., “No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering,” IEEE Computer 20, no. 4 (1987): 15.
63
Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, The Unix Programming Environment (Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984), viii.

28

Central in this philosophy, the Unix pipe, represented with the vertical bar glyph |, enables interprocess communication, so that several
programs can be connected to each others to create not just new functionality, but offer to the user the possibility of coding their own environment64 in a text driven environment of writerly computation.65 For
instance:lynx -dump -nolist http://ur1.ca/lzt7 | \dadadodo -c 20 - | \espeak -s 120 -v mb-en1 --stdin | \mbrola -e /usr/share/mbrola/voices/en1 - - | \ices2 netradio.xml

This particular pipeline is made of five different programs, that were
not created to work together but can nevertheless be combined because
they all comply with the Unix pipeline mechanism. What does it do?
It downloads66 a 2010 BBC web article67 on the lack of great works ofart using the Internet as medium, and renders the HTML page and its
54 slightly upset comments into plain text (lynx), then it passes it toa Markov chain based processing software to generate some relatively
grammatically correct text cut-ups (dadadodo). The resulting prose isturned into speech (espeak and mbrola), and the synthesized voice stream

64

Martin Howse, “The Unix Way,” Tux Deluxe, 2007, http://web.archive.org/web/20070420025204/http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/147.
65
See Florian Cramer, “EXE.CUT[UP]ABLE Statements: The Insistence of Code,”in Code: The Language of Our Time, ed. Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schöpf(Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003).
66
For readability purpose, the example above uses a shortened URL.
67
Will Gompertz, “40 Wild Birds Play a Gibson Les Paul Guitar,” 2010,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/willgompertz/2010/02/40_wild_birds_
play_a_gibson_le.html.

29

is sent to pre-existing audio broadcasting server (ices2), creating an instant British Broadcasting Cacophony net radio of sorts, accessible byanyone on the Internet.
Next to the way programs can be arranged with each other, the isomorphic relationship between the combination of source code and the
combination of the resulting binaries is further echoed in the way programmers and users work with each other with the aid of the very same
tools that emerged from early forms of collaborative and cooperative organisation: from the creation of a library for users to the emergence of
networked libraries of librarians. From the perspective of technologicaldeterminism, Unix itself will be instrumental in shaping these self-similar
forms of technological and social organisation. An illustration of this is
the introduction of Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) programs and protocols
in the 1979 seventh edition of Unix. Immediately upon release of this new
set of tools, two graduate students from Duke University, Tom Truscott
and Jim Ellis directly exploited the Lego brick versatility of Unix, by implementing a news system at the cross road of emails and bulletin boards,
using a combination of pre-existing simple programs.68 The software wasmade accessible across a network of Unix computers, transforming radically communication across Unix users and connecting them to foster
the development of software. By the summer of 1980, eight nodes wereconnected: Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Reed College, University of Oklahoma, two machines at Bell Labs Murray
Hill, and the University of California at Berkeley. The network, named

68

Said differently, it was a shell script.

30

Usenet, quickly expanded to become an unrestricted and not-for-profit
public platform, reaching six hundred nodes by 1983,69 and joining theassemblage of different and not always compatible computer networks
that co-existed during the pre-Internet era of computer networked communication.70 Usenet became the embodiment of a type of informal cooperative software development, bridging the corporate and university
Unix programming communities, where property rights and restrictions
on the reuse of software were mostly seen as irrelevant.71
So far, while no ideas like free or open source software were expressed,
their practice were nonetheless already embodied in the early days ofcomputation, and were in fact as I have shown, instrumental in its further expansion. According to O’Reilly, early Usenet was the Napster ofshared code.72 As a matter of fact, the birth of the Internet, more particularly its commercial industry, was triggered by the need to sustain
the infrastructure of the fully collaborative UUCP and Usenet infrastructure.73 Today, the technological legacy of Unix is overwhelming. It has
paved the way for a large family of operating systems found in servers,
network devices, video game consoles, desktop and laptop computers,
and of course smart phones, tablets and all sorts of digital gadgets. Yet,

69

For a more detailed historical account see Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (Los Alamitos: IEEE
Computer Society Press, 1997).
70
John S. Quaterman and Josiah C. Hoskins, “Notable Computer Networks,” Communications of the ACM 29, no. 10 (1986): 932–71.
71
Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole, “Economic Perspectives on Open Source,” in Perspectives
on Free and Open Source Software, ed. Scott A. Hissam Joseph Feller Brian Fitzgerald
and Karim R. Lakhani (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
72
O’Reilly, “Open Source Paradigm Shift.”
73
Ibid.

31

Figure 1.1: UNIX license plate

Photo: Armando P. Stettner, CC BY-SA 3.0, 201332

what is nonetheless most peculiar about Unix was this idea of programming freedom, independence and users community. This aspect was already explicit in the early days of the introduction of the system, where aconscious community oriented direction was set in motion by its original
authors: “a system around which a fellowship could form.”74 This ethos of
fellowship, is best exemplified with the early eighties vanity license plate(Figure 1.1) that was used throughout the history of Unix-like products,
and that combined the United States of America New Hampshire mottowith the name of the operating system: “LIVE FREE OR DIE - UNIX”.75

1.5

The Growing Unix Fellowship

As with Ada and Friedrich’s software, Unix and most of its programs were
eventually written in C,76 a general programming language developed byAmerican computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, and which specificity is in
its ability to not be tied to any operating system or machine,77 thus allowing Unix and other C programs to be easily ported to all sorts of different hardware. Unlike previous generation mainframe operating systems,

74

Dennis M. Ritchie, “The Evolution of the Unix Time-Sharing System,” in Language
Design and Programming Methodology : Proceedings of a Symposium Held at Sydney,
Australia, 10-11 September 1979, ed. Jeffrey M. Tobias (New York: Springer-Verlag,1980), 25.
75
The Open Group, “The History of the UNIX® License Plate,” 2017, http://www.unix.
org/license-plate.html.
76
For a more detailed report on the gradual transition from assembly to C, see Malcolm
Douglas McIlroy, “A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986,” technical report (AT&T Bell Laboratories, 1987).
77
Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, The C Programming Language (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1988), Introduction.

33

with C, software becomes more easily uncoupled from the hardware. If
the later was already made possible given the situation created by the1969 unbundling case with IBM,78 in which the computer manufacturer
was forced to sell the software part of his product separately to avoid amonopoly position, this precedent only becomes truly relevant to software development now that software portability was a technical given.79
The adaptability of Unix and the availability of its source code, turned
out to be ideal as a learning environment for graduate and undergraduate
students who could start to tinker with and enhance the code.80 The reading of the source code written by other users and system operators, thenbecame part of the learning process. Source code was and still is the primary documentation of software production, and is best exemplified with
the Star Wars film inspired abbreviation UTSL “use the source, Luke,”81
which was often expressed in developer user groups whenever someone
was trying to figure out something with an unfamiliar software or situation. But more than a manual, and connecting back to the process of
individuation, source code is influential in the development of programmer practice. As computer scientist Donald Knuth simply puts it, reading
source code is the mandatory step towards technological appropriation,
creativity and innovation: “[t]he more you learn to read other people’s

78

Burton Grad, “A Personal Recollection: IBM’s Unbundling of Software and Services,”
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 24, no. 1 (2002): 64–71.
79
Juris Reinfelds, “The First Port of UNIX,” Report (University of Wollongong. Department of Computing Science, 1988).
80
Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2004).
81
See UTSL entry in Eric S. Raymond and Guy L. Steele, “THE JARGON FILE, VERSION
2.9.6,” 1991, http://catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg296.txt.

34

stuff, the more able you are to invent your own in the future.”82
But Unix technical prowess aside, the cooperative productivity and educational value of accessing source files could be said for any software.
So why did Unix end up as an historical landmark of such principles?
As it turned out, Unix was more than just engineering freedom. Due to
AT&T’s legal monopoly status in running the USA long-distance phoneservice, Unix could not be sold as a product, neither was the corporation allowed to provide support for the software; however upon a simple
request and for a nominal fee, the source code could be acquired by anyone.83

Under a 1958 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case,
AT&T (the parent organization of Bell Labs) had been forbiddenfrom entering the computer business. Unix could not, therefore,be turned into a product; indeed, under the terms of the consent
decree, Bell Labs was required to license its non telephone technology to anyone who asked. Ken Thompson quietly began answering
requests by shipping out tapes and disk packs — each, according tolegend, with a note signed “love, ken.”84

At a time when the computer industry was still very immature, theslow democratisation of the computer utility approach, envisionned by
Fano in the sixties, materialised itself in an experimental way. In theprocess, it is notable that some of these experiments operated along similar dynamics as those of the nineteen sixties counterculture movement,

82

Quote from interview in Peter Seibel, Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft ofProgramming (New York: Apress, 2009), 601.
83
Warren Toomey, “The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix,” IEEE Spectrum, 2011, http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-strange-birth-and-long-life-of-unix/.
84
Raymond, The Art of UNIX Programming.

35

where the climate of dissent and anti-establishmentism favoured individual expression and independence in the context of communication technology that had the potential to transform cultural production.85 While
not being something that can be generalised and applied to the whole
computational culture of the nineteen sixties, important projects in thefield of networking and futurist mind expanding technology overlappedwith the counterculture movement. Other late nineteen fifties and sixties projects like the Augmentation Research Center (ARC), initiated byAmerican electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart, have been described as
being inhabited with part engineering culture and part counterculture.86
In particular, in the team of people helping Engelbart produce the canonical 1968 The Mother of All Demos—a famous live demonstration and visionof what would characterise todays personal computers and networks—
was American writer Stewart Brand, who was already working on his
Whole Earth Catalog where concepts from cybernetics, ecology, do-ityourself (DIY), self-sufficiency, alternative education and tools, including computers, were all mixed in the form of a countercultural productreview catalog. While not specific to Unix, I find it important to notesuch a cultural landscape as it is very much in this context of social experimentation, alternative tools and DIY practices that the developmentof Unix was facilitated. It was in this context that the early dispersing ofUnix copies started as an eccentric academic effort, largely ignored by big

85

Piero Scaruffi, A History of Silicon Valley, 1900-2015 (North Charleston: CreateSpace,2015), 5. The Hippies (1961-68).
86
See John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped
the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005), 163.

36

computer manufacturers,87 and the first Unix supporters were “delighted
in playing with an operating system that not only offered them fascinating challenges at the leading edge of computer science, but also subverted
all the technical assumptions and business practices that went with Big
Computing.”88 The 1975 user association Unix Users Group was instrumental in building such a computational counterculture. There, membersof the group could exchange new software and fixes by sending and receiving back magnetic tapes,89 and in that sense also actively encouraged
a form of self-sufficiency.
All these elements greatly contributed to help Unix spread like wildfire, and at the same time helped strengthen a system ending up modified
and maintained by a several user groups. One of the most notable byproducts was the 1977 Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix derivative put together at the time by Berkeley graduate student Bill Joy,90 andfrom which some ideas found their way back into the main official Unix
releases. Following the legacy of sharing operating system and programsource code in the early general purpose computer groups like SHARE,
the group dynamics and exchanges occurring within the Unix scene91 canbe best described as being proto free and open source software production.

87

Scaruffi, A History of Silicon Valley, 1900-2015, 5. The Hippies (1961-68).
Raymond, The Art of UNIX Programming, 58.
89
Toomey, “The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix.”
90
Marshall Kirk McKusick, “Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From at&T-Owned toFreely Distributable,” in Open Source: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, ed.
Sam Ockman Chris Dibona and Mark Stone (Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 1999).
91
Andrew Leonard, “BSD Unix: Power to the People, from the Code,” Salon, 2000, http://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/.
88

37

So, to return to my doubt as to whether or not the cooperative and collaborative models of free and open source software should be perceived
as novel, it should now become clear that they are not. In fact the notionof social software,92 is not specific to free and open source software, but
deeply rooted in the birth of software making. All that said, if the technological aspect of these collaborative and cooperative exchanges werealready highly mature, their legal framework at the opposite end wascompletely underdeveloped. What could possibly go wrong in such a situation? As it turned out it is this particular situation that will come toendanger the proto free and open source software production model, andas I will explain in the next two sections, lead finally to the necessity felt
by some programmers to define and protect these practices, to protect
such social software.

1.6

Controlling Software Development

Earlier on, I mentioned that in order to distribute her software, user Ada
had two possibilities: either providing the source files or only ship thecompiled program. Now let’s assume that another user of the system,
let’s call him Richard, is interested in using Friedrich’s variation of Ada’s
software. However this time Friedrich decides to only give Richard theobject code. With this, Richard is able to run the software but modifying
it becomes rather problematic. If he decides to open it with a text editor

92

Matthew Fuller, Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003), 24–28.

38

he will be surprised to see something like the following:%^L ^@h^@^@^@^@éàÿÿÿÿ%^B^L ^@h^A^@^@^@éÐÿÿÿ1íI<89>Ñ^H<89>âH<83>äðPTI
ÇÀÀ^E@^@HÇÁ0^E@^@HÇÇ^@^E@^@èÇÿÿÿô<90><90>H<83>ì^HH<8b>^E<99>^K ^@H<85>Àt^BÿÐH<83>Ä^HÃ<90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90>UH<89>åSH<83>ì^H<80>=°^K ^@^@uK»@^N‘^@H<8b>^Eª^K ^@H<81>ë8^N‘^@HÁû^
CH<83>ë^AH9Øs$f^O^_D^@^@H<83>À^AH<89>^E<85>^K ^@ÿ^TÅ8^N‘^@H<8b>^Ew^K^@H9ØrâÆ^Ec^K ^@^AH<83>Ä^H[]Ãfff.^O^_<84>^@^@^@^@^@H<83>=p^@^@UH<89>åt^R¸^@^@^@^@H<85>Àt^H]¿H^N‘^@ÿà]Ã<90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90>UH<89>åH<83>ì^PH<8d><%^\^F@^@ÇEü^@^@^@^@°^@èÒþÿÿ<8b>Mü<89>Eø<89>ÈH<83>Ä^P]Ã<90><90><90><90>H<89>l$ØL<89>d$àH<8d>-ã^H ^@L<8d>%Ü^H ^@L<89>l$èL<89>t$ðL<89>|$øH<89>\$ÐH<83>ì8L)åA<89>
ýI<89>öHÁý^CI<89>×èSþÿÿH<85>ít^\1Û^O^_@^@L<89>úL<89>öD<89>ïAÿ^TÜH<83>Ã^AH9ëuêH<8b>\$^HH<8b>l$^PL<8b>d$^XL<8b>l$ L<8b>t$(L<8b>|$0H<83>Ä8Ã
^O^_<80>^@^@^@^@óÃ<90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90><90>UH<89>åSH<83>ì^HH<8b>^EH^H ^@H<83>øÿt^Y»(^N‘^@^O^_D^@^@H<83>ë^HÿÐH<8b>^CH<83>øÿuñH<83>Ä^H[]Ã<90><90>H<83>ì^HèOþÿÿH<83>Ä^HÃ^@^@^A^@^B^@There is no software.
%^@^@^A^[^C;(^@^@^@^D^@^@^@¬ýÿÿD^@^@^@Ìþÿÿl^@^@^@üþÿÿ<8c>^@^@^@<8c>ÿ
ÿÿ´^@^@^@^T^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^AzR^@^Ax^P^A^[^L^G^H<90>^A^@^@$^@^@^@^\^@^@^@‘ýÿÿ0^@^@^@^@^N^PF^N^XJ^O^Kw^H<80>^@?^Z;*3$”^@^@^@^@^\^@^@^@D^@^@^@Xþÿÿ,^@^@^@^@A^N^P<86>^BC^M^F^@^@^@^@^@^@^@$^@^@^@d^@^@^@hþÿÿ<89>^@^@^@^@Q<8c>^E<86>^F_^N@<83>^G<8f>^B<8e>^C<8d>^D^BX^N^H^@^@^@^T^@^@^@<8c>^@^@^@Ðþÿÿ^B^@^@^@^@^@

This situation could be roughly described as similar to the transformation of annotated human music notation into a piano roll. With the soleaccess to the latter, it would be rather difficult to recreate the original
music sheet, adding to that the loss of information that was not relevant
for the creation of the roll and therefore impossible to access. So yes,
one can see there is no software in this stream of randomly looking characters, but this is in fact the binary machine code of Friedrich’s softwarethat Richard’s text editor desperately tries to translate into plain text, as itis the only thing it can interpret. Maybe another interpreter could help?
To reverse the translation that was done by the compiler, Richard can use
some tools.
39For instance a disassembler, will effectively translate the object code
into architecture dependent assembly language. Unlike C, assembly language is a human-readable representation of low-level machine instructions, and while this is one step friendlier than reading binary, or hexadecimal translated machine code, and of course much more readable than
opening a compiled program with a text editor, it is still quite far fromthe comfort provided by C, which is why the later is called a high-level
programming language as it provides an abstraction from computation,by the means of natural language. Below an extract from the more than
five hundred lines of output produced from the command objdump -sd
software, typed by Richard on his terminal:[...]
Contents of section .rodata:
400618 01000200 54686572 65206973 206e6f20 ....There is no400628 736f6674 77617265 2e0a00
software...
[...]0000000000400500 <main>:
400500:
55
push
%rbp
400501:48 89 e5mov%rsp,%rbp
400504:48 83 ec 10
sub$0x10,%rsp400508:48 8d 3c 25 1c 06 40
lea
0x40061c,%rdi
40050f:00
400510:c7 45 fc 00 00 00 00
movl$0x0,-0x4(%rbp)
400517:b0 00
mov$0x0,%al
400519:e8 d2 fe ff ff
callq 4003f0 <printf@plt>
40051e:8b 4d fcmov
-0x4(%rbp),%ecx
400521:89 45 f8
mov%eax,-0x8(%rbp)
400524:89 c8
mov%ecx,%eax
400526:48 83 c4 10
add$0x10,%rsp40052a:5d
pop%rbp
40052b:c3
retq40052c:90
nop40052d:90
nop40052e:90nop40052f:90
nop

40

This sample is the most relevant as it displays the main entry point of
the program and where to find the string of text that is displayed when
the object code is executed. For such a trivial example, Richard could
easily make a modified version of the software, by adjusting the content
of the executable with a simple hexadecimal editor. However, making
the program do something else, like writing the string of text to a fileinstead of displaying it on the terminal’s shell, would require more extensive modifications of the binary. It would require to change the program functionality and not just editing a string of characters. In fact, suchmodifications become exponentially difficult, as the new desired features
drift too far from the original software’s purpose and features.93 The question to be asked then, given the cooperative and technical advantage ofdistributing the source code of a software, why would one refuse to doso, literally deciding to distribute closed source software and therefore
limiting the interpretation value of software?
As stated previously, Unix’s popularity and easily obtainable licensed
source code allowed for the modification and creation of other Unices.
However the resulting Cambrian explosion of all sorts of Unices, researchUnix, commercial Unix implementations, academic Unices and so forth,

93

This issue, the process of which belongs to the practice of reverse engineering, isparticularly visible in projects that attempt to improve an existing software for which
original source code and documentation is not available, or is purposefully protectedor obfuscated. For instance Vitaly Kiselev’s research on the software powering a
range of Panasonic digital cameras, has enabled the improvement in the quality fromtheir recorded images and motion, but does not add entirely new and distinct features
to the camera. These changes are much more difficult to make without the tools,
files, and technical documentation to produce the software in the same way as the
manufacturer did. See Personal View Talk, “GH2 Possible Improvements,” 2011, http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/14/gh2-possible-improvements/.

41

eventually led some to wonder who actually controlled and owned thisparticular source code. Already in the mid-seventies, the freeness of
this operating system became more and more questionable. Starting firstwith the threat from AT&T to the Unix User Group, asking the group to
stop using the Western Electric owned UNIX trademark, the community
renamed itself USENIX.94 The same year, Australian computer scientist
John Lions published a commentary on the Version 6 of the UNIX operating system,95 for use as teaching material. It quickly became a must-readbook for anyone interested in Unix and operating systems in general, andwas eventually distributed by Bell Labs itself. Even so, due to WesternElectric’s desire to limit the distribution of the source because of trade
secret status in the kernel96 —combined with the change in the license of
1979 Version 7 of UNIX that started to forbid classroom use—the bookbecame forbidden literature continuing to spread via samizdat.97 The legal layer in which the code was wrapped also made it hard to merge theefforts of the different contributing groups, with the work from thoseat Bell Labs. At this point, update and fixes were propagating in a very
secretive way:[…] Lou Katz, the founding president of USENIX, received a phone
call one day telling him that if he went down to a certain spot on
Mountain Avenue (where Bell Labs was located) at 2 p.m., he wouldfind something of interest. Sure enough, Katz found a magnetic tapewith the bug fixes, which were rapidly in the hands of countless94

Greg Lehey, “President’s Column,” The Journal AUUG Inc., 2003.
John Lions, A Commentary on the Sixth Edition of the UNIX Operating System (Sydney:
University of New South Wales, 1977).
96
Raymond and Steele, “THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.2.1,” Lions Book.
97
Salus, The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin, The Users.
95

42

users.98

This particular Unix era is not very well documented, depending bywhich Unix historian these anecdotes are told, the narrative and the mythchange slightly. But understandable romanticism aside, it does confirm
that some unofficial back channels had been purposefully put in place atthe time or in an ad hoc way, inside and outside of Bell Labs, to bypass
entirely the legal limitations of Unix and the official corporate channelsof distribution.
This tension reached a point of non-return in 1983 with the breakupof the Bell System freed AT&T from the 1956 anti-trust consent decree,that had so far forbidden it from using Unix as a commercial product. Despite coming from the same Bell Labs Research Unix root, the following
licensing of the newly AT&T UNIX System V released the same year ofthe divestiture, accelerated the development of the commercial Unices,and dramatically increased the cultural gap with university efforts suchas BSD.99 In fact, By the mid-eighties, dramatic changes had occurredin the fast expanding world of computer business. The control over the
copying, modification, and distribution of software became essential toensure the large scale monetisation and capitalisation of executable code.
This is why commercial closed source proprietary software, as a valid
business model, grew in parallel with the standardisation and democratisation of computing infrastructures—due to the strong business decou-

98
99

Toomey, “The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix.”
The rest of the so-called Unix wars that follow, and that will cripple many efforts todevelop the operating system throughout the eighties and nineties, is outside of thescope of this text.

43

pling between software publishing and hardware manufacturing100 —and
accelerated by a hobbyist computer scene that was operating outside of
the academic walled garden of computer science.101
All that said, it is worth insisting that this was not specific to Unix systems. The same reversal was visible across the whole computer industry.
And for instance, the once IBM supported SHARE group who used towork on the source of the tools and operating systems of their machine,
were eventually denied access to the code in 1983 after the introduction ofa new Object Code Only (OCO) policy. According to a SHARE memo celebrating with sarcasm the tenth anniversary of OCO, at the time of theannouncement, the man who eventually became the Senior Vice President of IBM had “came to SHARE and said that [IBM] no longer needed
customer creativity.”102 Today’s fragile relationship and labour transaction occurring between user generated content and online platforms orservice providers103 is nothing new, it is just history repeating itself.

100

A transition point in that historical business decoupling is visible for instance in the
way Commodore International, a famous eighties home computer manufacturer, licensed from another company, Microsoft, its ROM-resident BASIC for several of its
machines, including the highly popular Commodore 64. Roberto Dillon, Ready : A
Commodore 64 Retrospective (Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2015), 17. Of course,
Microsoft was also selling licenses for its BASIC to other home computer manufacturers and end-users.
101
See Kevin Driscoll, “Professional Work for Nothing: Software Commercializationand ‘an Open Letter to Hobbyists’,” Information & Culture 50, no. 2 (2015): 257–83.
102
Melinda Varian, “PU/MELINDA to VMSHARE. Memorandum,” 1993.
103
Trebor Scholz, Digital Labor : The Internet as Playground and Factory (London: Routledge, 2013).

44

1.7

Fratricide Software

Stallman, who joined the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in theearly seventies, was a strong believer in what American journalist Steven
Levy called the “hacker ethic,”104 which originated from the sixties computer programming scene, and in which several principles were shared,
namely that: information and technology should be freely accessible
and unrestricted; hackers should be judged solely on their hacking skills,
which is to say the technological elegance and crafting dimension of
their work; and overall, computers can be used to improve society.105
Within this subculture, and in regard to the brief historical overview
of the early days of general purpose computing covered previously,
sharing software was “as old as computers, just as the sharing of recipes
is as old as cooking.”106
Stallman was not from the same generation as the initial Unix authors,and not a Unix user himself, but he was however fully aware of the habitus of software production at the time, being himself introduced to it at a
relatively young age with the practice of programming interleaved withhis studies at Harvard and MIT, and eventually becoming his main occupation. And as much as Unix suffered from the intellectual property
issues mentioned previously, it was not the only project to become legallyconstrained by the novel business model that was closed source software.

104

Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984; repr., Sebastopol:
O’Reilly, 2010), The Hacker Ethic.
105
Ibid.
106
Richard M. Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (Boston: Free Software Foundation, 2002), 17.

45

This was a global change felt across all the academic research fields forwhich computers had became tools of the trade. Software was no longer
solely produced within technological limitations, but also within the legal constraints operating on top of, and overriding the former. But ifwhat happens at the MIT AI Lab is also connected to this change in thecomputer industry landscape, it is mostly the story of its community of
programmers who were torn apart in an epic tragedy that was the catalyst to the first expression of user freedom.
In brief, two companies, Symbolics and Lisp Machines Inc., emerged
from the MIT AI Lab scene and were both centred around the production of proprietary Lisp machines, which were general purpose computers running the LISP computer programming language. The two efforts
came out from the lab members themselves. One company, Symbolics
was an archetypical computer business built around outside investmentthat hired many lab members full-time to work on their product, while
the other, according to Stallman, was meant to be a “hacker” company
keen to sustain and support the lab hacker culture by hiring the programmers part-time107 and relying solely on economies of scale for the development of its capital and resources. Eventually both companies hired
hackers from the lab, and the ex-MIT programmers from both systems
kept on contributing to improve the AI Lab’s own Lisp machines. However at some point, in order to get rid of the competition—still according
to Stallman—Symbolics demanded that the lab only use their machines

107

Richard M. Stallman, “My Lisp Experiences and the Development of Gnu Emacs,”
2014, https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html.

46

in order to keep using Symbolics software, and Stallman, who was at thetime pretty much the only one left of this generation of hackers, and not
hired by any of the companies, recalls:
This, in effect, meant that they demanded that we had to choose aside, and use either the MIT version of the system or the Symbolics
version. Whichever choice we made determined which system ourimprovements went to. If we worked on and improved the Symbolics version, we would be supporting Symbolics alone. If we used andimproved the MIT version of the system, we would be doing work
available to both companies, but Symbolics saw that we would be
supporting LMI because we would be helping them continue to exist. So we were not allowed to be neutral any more108

The rest is history, at the beginning of 1982 and until the end of
1983, Stallman dedicated almost two years of his life replicating theimprovements made by Symbolics, and sharing them with Lisp MachineInc. American anthropologist Gabriella Coleman would later qualify
Stallman’s work during this period, as that of a “revenge programmer.”109
But this is not a simple revenge. Stallman felt that he was forced to takeon this role of “punisher,”110 and admits that he did not care so muchabout the future of Lisp Machines Inc. either.111 So, more than just arevenge, Stallman was essentially trying to maintain the illusion of acommunity, not letting go of what used to be the MIT AI lab culture
and thereby becoming a human bridge between the trio Symbolics, Lisp
Machines Inc., and the MIT AI Lab. The software he wrote was more an
emergency band aid than a revenge.

108

Ibid.
Coleman, Coding Freedom, 68.
110
Stallman, “My Lisp Experiences and the Development of Gnu Emacs.”
111
Ibid.
109

47

In fact, I think that what this episode reveals essentially is the ethicalfoundation of what will become free software, a foundation born fromthis fratricide and proprietary war, and in which the strategy of not sharing software was not the main issue. It was just one of the weapons usedin the attempt to control the MIT AI Lab territory, a war during which
Stallman was only concerned with the collateral damage: the disappearance of his fellow programmers employed at these computer manufacturers and his increasing loneliness.112 There was no other evil entity, but the
self-inflicted shredding of a group of people unable to work together andunable to reconcile commercial interests within their academic walled
garden.
These aspects however became quickly conflated, and to be sure, I
mean that it is probably with Stallman that the moral attribute of software production becomes for the first time a cornerstone, where there
was an attempt to make a distinction between two kinds of user groups
generalised from the AI Lab event:113 the first kind are socially driven
groups that emerge in a rather decentralised, and self-governing way,
which rely on historical social traditions and legacies of computational
culture, as USENIX was initially; and the second kind are groups in whichusers are mere customers consolidating an existing product, like the early

112
113

Levy, Hackers, 448.
I say it is an attempt to make a distinction because I also think this is a convenient
simplification, that would obviously permit Stallman to justify his tragic exodus andnew mission in the years that followed. Similarly such a radical distinction between
two kinds of groups only works within the rethoric of the free and open source
software subcultural hero. As I will also begin to explain in the following chapters,
the categorisation of communities is not as simple in reality as it first seems.

48

days of the SHARE group.114

1.8

The Need to Define

Having failed to save the AI Lab of his generation, Stallman left theconflict of two Lisp machine manufacturers and MIT, and in 1983
announced, on both USENET and ARPANET, the creation of his Ark,
the GNU project, a recursive acronym which stands for GNU’s not Unix,
a free Unix-like operating system with Lisp implementations as user
programs:

Free Unix!
Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unixcompatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), andgive it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time,money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.
[…]
I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must
share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience
sign a non-disclosure agreement or a software license agreement.
So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software
so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not
free.115

114

I mention early days, because throughout its history the SHARE group became more
and more independent, starting most notably with the work on its own operating
system, the SHARE OS (SOS), See Akera, “Voluntarism and the Fruits of Collaboration.”. But in the case of SHARE as the sense of community will surpass the roleof customer, SHARE became somehow less and less relevant to IBM’s own businessagenda, as mentioned previously, with the introduction of the OCO policy.
115
Richard M. Stallman, “New Unix Implementation,” September 27, 1983, http://www.
electriceditors.net/grapevine/issues/83.txt.

49

Finally abstracted from their originating stories, the notion of usergroups and fellowship that were so far overlapping with consumerism
and computer clientèle, with Stallman changed into ideas of self-sufficientuser communities, as well as of tales of a neighbourhood oppressed by abad other seeking to impose its rules upon the group:This meant that the first step in using a computer was to promise
not to help your neighbour. A cooperating community was forbidden. The rule made by the owners of proprietary software was, “Ifyou share with your neighbour, you are a pirate. If you want any
changes, beg us to make them.”116

Later, in March 1985, Stallman accentuated his call in the now famous
GNU manifesto. In October of the same year, he founded and registered
the Free Software Foundation (FSF) with the following purpose:

The corporation is formed for literary, educational, and charitablepurposes with the special purposes of i) encouraging, fostering, andpromoting the free exchange of computer software and information related to computers and other technology; ii) distributing anddisseminating software and information related to computers andother technology; and iii) increasing the public’s access to computers and other high technology devices.117

The first attempt to define free software naturally also came from Stallman who, a year after the GNU Manifesto, published a text about the
newly created FSF, which contained a brief articulation of what exactly
can be considered as free software:

116
117

Stallman, Free Software, Free Society, 18.
Stallman, “The GNU Manifesto.”

50

The word “free” in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it toyour neighbours, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, thefreedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead ofit controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available
to you.118

What had been bootstrapped by the FSF and the early concept of free
software then gradually became an inspiration for others. One of themost notable can be found in the creation of the popular Debian free software operating system.119 At the same time, in this new wave of free
software projects, it is possible to start to see the effects of cultural diffusion of the core FSF ideas. Debian for instance, does not aim to implement
the GNU OS or an OS that directly translates the concepts from Stallman,
instead it further articulates the definition of free software, specificallyits social dimension, that was sketched with Stallman’s community etiquette, subtly shifting from the idea of users to the concept of neighbours.
So with the Debian operating system, the definition becomes embedded
within a social contract. This contract was drafted and eventually announced by American computer programmer Bruce Perens in 1997, who
was at the time project leader of Debian.120 The Debian Free Software
Guideline part of this social contract is based on 10 sections, that build
upon Stallman’s definition published more than a decade earlier:

1. Free redistribution.

118

Richard M. Stallman, “What Is the Free Software Foundation?” GNU’s Bulletin, 1986.
Ian Murdock, “The Debian Manifesto,” 1994, http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/
project-history/ap-manifesto.en.html.
120
Bruce Perens, “Debian’s ‘Social Contract’ with the Free Software Community,” July4, 1997, https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/1997/msg00017.html.
11951

2. Inclusion of source code.
3. Allowing for modifications and derived works.
4. Integrity of the author’s source code (as a compromise).
5. No discrimination against persons or groups.
6. No discrimination against fields of endeavour, like commercialuse.
7. The license needs to apply to all to whom the program is redistributed.
8. License must not be specific to Debian, basically a reiterationof the previous point.
9. License must not contaminate other software.
10. The GPL, BSD, and Artistic licenses are examples of licenses
considered free.121

This guideline is modified a few years later to serve as the Open Source
definition,122 for the newly founded Open Source Initiative (OSI), following the 1998 call to embrace the term open source instead of free software.123 It can be summed up as the following:

1. Free Redistribution
2. Inclusion of Source Code
3. Allowing for modifications and Derived Works
4. Integrity of The Author’s Source Code5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavour, like commercial use
7. The license needs to apply to all to whom the program is redistributed.
8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software
10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral124

121This is an extract of all the headlines from ibid.
Bruce Perens, “The Open Source Definition,” in Open Sources: Voices from the Open
Source Revolution, ed. Sam Ockman Chris Dibona and Mark Stone (Sebastopol:
O’Reilly, 1999).
123
Eric S. Raymond, “Goodbye, ‘Free Software’; Hello, ‘Open Source’,” 1998, http://www.
catb.org/esr/open-source.html.
124This is an extract of all the headlines from Perens, “The Open Source Definition.”.
122

52

As with software source code that gets shared and modified to fit one
user’s specific need or interpretation, with the open source definition, it
is possible to see that similar exchanges are now happening at the levelof the articulation of such practices. Software freedom is no longer a concept that describes existing practices, it is also an idea evolving independently within an ever expending territory where different agendas meet.
When comparing the two definitions, the striking similarity whether inthese shortened versions above or with the full texts, one can certainly
wonder about the redundancy of such an effort. However, it becomesapparent that each project brings a different facet forward. Could it bethat just like Debian’s particular attention to the social context of free
software, some others have found in this idea another trait that needs
more promotion? In fact the change of some words is not innocent. For
instance the clause 9 of both definition has seen a change in the word contaminate into restrict. The explanation for this clause remained however
unchanged, and the purpose of this rule is to avoid licenses that would impose constraints on the other software it is bundled with inside the samecollection or medium. Two things can be deducted from such a change:
one, access to the source code is not enough to be free or open source
software;125 two, open source appears to be a tamed re-articulation offree software.
In fact this re-articulation finds its origin in a meeting held in 1998 fol-

125

For instance the source code of the email client pine, released under a legal notice thatdemands particular commercial and distribution conditions that breaks the clauseon contamination/restriction, is neither free software in the Debian sense, or open
source software. See Pine Information Center, “Pinel Legal Issues,” 2007, https://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/legal.html.

53

lowing the release of the source code from Web browser Netscape Communicator 4.0126 by Netscape Communications Corporation. For many,
this event is a sign that open models of production can be relevant tobusiness practices, and should therefore be advocated, supported, and actively promoted,.127 Even so, for the future founders of the OSI, words
such as free and freedom were too ambiguous to be used effectively in acommercial context, hence the need to make a discursive move from free
software to open source,128 in which the questions of hacker ethics andfree society are radically reformulated to fit the economic relevance of
openness in the context of free market and laissez-faire, and as a consequence make the social software aspect of the FSF secondary to an affiliation with the political philosophy of libertarianism, occasionaly madeexplicit by OSI members.129 However this did not halt the FSF efforts, andthroughout the years the free software definition evolved and, again, aswith the writing of software code that is virtually never completed, newfeatures were added. Today’s version of the definition originates in its
major update made in 2000, which contains four elements best known as
the four essential freedoms of programs users:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to yourneeds (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for
this.

126

Open Source Initiative, “History of the OSI,” 2012, https://opensource.org/history.
See Boomen and Schäfer, “Will the Revolution Be Open-Sourced? How Open Source
Travels Through Society.”128
The term open source was coined by American nanotechnologist Christine Peterson
during the 1998 meeting, as stated in Open Source Initiative, “History of the OSI.”.
129
Michael Tiemann, “What I Learned from the Libertarians,” 2007, https://opensource.
org/node/184.
127

54

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour(freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.130

According to Bruce Perens, Stallman’s update might have been motivated by the creation of the OSI, “as an alternative to the Open Source
Definition”, and he suggests that they probably existed prior to their online release.131 As a matter of fact they even existed as three freedoms in
1998,132 which are now numbered 1,2 and 3. Freedom 0 was added at alater stage in 1999.133 Still, the difference between the two is more visible in the way they are interpreted by their respective supporters. With
the historical schism, it is almost as if the merged pragmatic and the social dimension of the Unix user groups legacy was suddenly parted in an
irreconcilable mode.

Nearly all open source software is free software; the two terms describe almost the same category of software. But they stand forviews based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a
development methodology; free software is a social movement. For
the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative,
because only free software respects the users’ freedom. By contrast,
the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how tomake software “better”–in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software move-

130

Richard M. Stallman, “What Is Free Software?” 2000, http://web.archive.org/web/
20000302065400/http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.
131
Bruce Perens, “Re:1997 ?”2009, http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=
1129863&cid=26875815.
132
Richard M. Stallman, “What Is Free Software?” 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/
19980126185518/http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.
133
Richard M. Stallman, “What Is Free Software?” 1999, http://web.archive.org/web/
19990430060825/http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

55

ment, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving
to free software is the solution.134

Here, Stallman reduces open source to a development methodology,
but fails to see he is applying the same approach to free software itself, byapplying the prototyping and engineering culture of software production
to the free software discourse, constantly improving the free software definitions, licenses, and texts as if they were products that improve withevery new version.135 For Raymond open source is essentially free software without ideology, and solely based on “economics and development
processes and expected return.”136 Being a member of the American Libertarian Party, the OSI founder is not quite a socialist or Marxist hacker,a point he often makes explicit in his writing, whenever he feels open
source risks generalisation and reduction to political interpretations forwhich he has no particular sympathy.137 His critique of free software’s
ideology is nothing but a conservative tactic to frame Stallman as theleader of a fanatical and crazy project. However, if I consider ideology inthe terms defined by British media theorist Dick Hebdige in Subculture:
The Meaning of Style,138 the schism between free software and open source

134

Richard M. Stallman, “Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software,” 2007,https://web.archive.org/web/20070210084243/http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
open-source-misses-the-point.html.
135
As an example, the 2007 article from which this text is quoted, has been continuously
modified throughout the years, and still is at time of writing.
136
Andrew Leonard, “Let My Software Go!” Salon, 1998, https://www.salon.com/1998/
03/30/feature947788266/.
137
See Eric S. Raymond, “A Response to Nikolai Bezroukov,” First Monday 4, no. 11(1999), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/702/612.
138
Drawing most notably from Marx, Althusser and Barthes, Hebdige provides abroader approach to ideologies as the set of means and signs representing the interests of specific groups and classes. See Hebdige, Subculture, 11–15.

56

software is in fact nothing more than the manifestation of different ideologies, whose subjects could no longer live under the same roof, as it
became clearer that their ruling ideas were not quite the same. Of course,
this process is not necessarily obvious or conscious for all of those who
lived through this split, in the sense that the implicit ideological assumptions of the free and open source software definitions are not immediately
visible, if ever, leaving some to switch sides several times. This was for
instance the case of Perens, who, even having drafted both the Debianand OSI definitions, would in 1999 leave the open source camp that hehelped establish, precisely because of this increasing drifting away fromwhat he believed were the original intentions of free software.139
This is why I disagree with Kelty, who after having significantly
summed up the difficulty of framing and using the term movement inreference to these two groups, concludes that they “share practice first,
and ideologies second.”140 But practice and ideology cannot be so easily
decoupled. Of course, when free and open source software is analysedthrough the lens of subculture, it is logical to understand that sourcecode is the commodity through which the subversion takes place in theform of an heroic liberation from its proprietary and restricted context
within the increasingly mainstream computer industry. So in that sense,
it is easy to mix up free software and open source software practices
as one shared front. But this is not how it works, and what I think ismore crucial here is that, liberated source code itself can also be opened

139

Bruce Perens, “It’s Time to Talk About Free Software Again,” February 17, 1999, https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/02/msg01641.html.
140
Kelty, Two Bits, 113.

57

to a double inflection.141 I wish to stress that the same piece of sourcecode can be used differently as free software or open source software,even if the license is the same. This is made very explicit with theLinux kernel, licensed under the free software and open source software
approved GPLv2, the main line of development of which is in the formof an open source project within a well established software industry,142
and, at the same time, also exists as a distinct free software project,
GNU Linux-libre,143 which offers an alternative version cleaned from all
potential proprietary and closed source compromises made with said
software industry, and is the recommended kernel for FSF approved
GNU/Linux distributions.144 Therefore, as I explained previously, whatmatters ultimately is the human interpretation of these particular
instructions: free and open source software licensed source code is not
only an element of resistance against an external hegemonic entity, it isa place holder for multiple forms of resistance acting against each other’s
potential rise to dominance, and in the free versus open source case, it isthe expression of a liberal conflict to decide what should be prioritised:141

Double inflection in the case of the historical split, but also in many more cases, as I
will develop further in this thesis.
142
At time of writing, the latest report from the Linux Foundation states that since2005, 1340 companies have contributed to the software, and currently 92,3% of contributions are from paid developers. See Jonathan Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman,“Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It Is Going, Who Is Doing It, What They Are
Doing and Who Is Sponsoring the Work,” research report (The Linux Foundation,2016).
143
Free Software Foundation Latin America, “GNU Linux-Libre Project,” 2016, https://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/selibre/linux-libre/.
144
I will return to this example in Chapter 3. It is also worth noting that even within
the same camp several interpretations of a term or practice can co-exist, for instancewith copyleft being perceived as strategy rather than a moral principle by free software supporters. See Bradley M. Kuhn, “GCC, Llvm, Copyleft, Companies, and NonProfits,” 2014, http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/01/26/llvm.html.

58

ethics or economics. This dichotomy is not shared but echoed in theirrespective practices.

1.9

Software Licenses

Practically speaking, these parallel efforts from the FSF, Debian, and the
OSI, operate as both a guideline for new, and a filter for, existing unilateral permissions specific to intellectual property: the software licenses.
The emphasis on ethics and economics in free and open source software ismore than a collection of beliefs, it is also a disciplinary and normalisingprocess that needs to be coded and enforced. The software license works
therefore as a permission given to the licensee to distribute the licensor’s
copyrighted work under specific terms.145 To be sure, a free and open
source software license is not a contract. During the twentieth century,
licensing has been approached through the perspective of an exchangeof promises, such as giving a copy of a copyrighted work in exchange
for a fee and the respect of some obligations, but free and open source
software licenses are in fact closer to historical property law licensing:
they are unilateral permissions in which no obligations are reciprocallyrequired by the licensor.146 They rely on copyright law, not contract law,so if the licensee does not respect the term of the license, which are essentially terms of distribution, they can be expressed by the plaintiff as

145
146

For the licenses that rely on copyright.
Pamela Jones, “The GPL Is a License, Not a Contract,” LWN.net, 2003, https://lwn.net/
Articles/61292/.

59the redistribution of copyrighted work without permission and not as abreach of contract.147
According to Austrian computer scientist and technology historian Peter H. Salus, the first software license for Unix was written in 1977 when
the operating system was ported to the Model 7/32 and Model 8/32 32-bit
minicomputers developed by Interdata, Inc. Prior to that, Unix ran solely
on the PDP-11/20 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Mainframe operating systems ran only on the machineswith which they were sold and the idea of decoupling hardware fromsoftware was far from obvious.148 Of course as mentioned earlier, the1969 IBM unbundling case made necessary the sale of software separatelyfrom the hardware. However, such necessity was transformed into a
possibility for further commercial strategies only after programs became
portable. Software licensing also brought a moment of deceptive recognition that source code was not some magical public property, but rather an
actual privately owned object, the rules of access and use of which were
defined in increasingly constricting terms. If, on the one hand, it is possible to reflect upon the evanescence of software149 or its performativity,150
the software industry eventually responded to the question of software
as an immaterial cultural expression in a very crude and direct way. Under USA jurisdiction, software can be considered as an original human

147

Ibid.
Salus, The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin, 102.
149
Friedrich Kittler, “There Is No Software,” CTHEORY, 1995, http://www.ctheory.net/
articles.aspx?id=74.
150
Adrian Mackenzie, “The Performativity of Code: Software and Cultures of Circulation,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 1 (2005): 71–92.
148

60

creation, which therefore can be copyrighted. It’s as simple as that, andto simplify things further, this applies whether or not the software exists
as object code or is available in a more human friendly medium and language. As a result, selling software becomes a problem as it could imply a
copyright transfer, which is why as a workaround the computer industry
started to license software.151
Free from legal restriction to enter the computer market, AT&T createdthe Unix Systems Laboratory and in 1988 a Unix license costed 100,000
USD, something affordable for corporations such as IBM and DEC, but
not for university researchers and smaller groups that were therefore motivated to switch to BSD Unix. There was a catch however, even though
BSD Unix was distributed with its own highly permissive licensing, thefact that it was built upon AT&T property meant that BSD users were
supposed to also acquire the costly license from the corporation in order to use the system in complete legitimacy.152 As a response to this,BSD developers came up with the idea of separating their own contributions and modifications from AT&T’s source files, and releasing thewhole lot in 1989, as Networking Release 1 under the generous terms of
one of the early BSD-style license.153 For the more affordable fee of 1,000
USD, one was given a tape with source files, and the rights to do pretty

151

Ira V. Heffan, “Copyleft: Licensing Collaborative Works in the Digital Age,” Stanford
Law Review 49, no. 6 (1997): 1487–1521, I. Software License Agreements.
152
Weber, The Success of Open Source, 39.
153
Such strategies are still popular today, they allow the redistribution of modified copyrighted software. For instance groups and individuals from the ROM translation
scene—communities focussed on making high quality fan translations of non locallised video games—only distribute their work as patches to apply on top of the original software, so as to limit the visibility of an activity that is already questionablegiven the derivative nature of the work.

61

much anything with it, including turning the code into closed source proprietary software and copying everything without any royalties due, aslong as credit to Berkeley was clearly given and original copyright notices in the source files remained intact.154 From this point on, the BSD
project would progressively attempt to get rid of AT&T’s code, rewriting
what was missing and accepting contributions which would turn BSD
into more complete operating systems, as opposed to its early existence
as a patch on top of AT&T’s UNIX.
This led to a new wave of Unix-like systems that were released throughout the early nineties, with some of these standalone systems distributed
as proprietary software.155 As mentioned in Section 1.5 of this chapter,the original BSD development,156 demonstrates the existence of proto free
and open source software practices that combine in one project the traditional hacking context, the practice of collaborative code development
and sharing, and provide a software licensing model so as to escape vendor control and instead favour freedom for the users. Given this situationand the apparent overlap in practices, it might seem strange that Stallman does not join the effort of the proto-free software BSD. As it turns
out, once again, sharing practices is not everything. Next to the entanglement of BSD Unix in several licensing systems,157 a crucial problem

154

Ibid., 40.
For an in-depth history on these early days of BSD Unix and the legal battle with
AT&T that followed the distribution of proprietary Unix-like systems, see ibid., The
Early History of Open Source.
156
As well as all its surrounding stories relating to the development of some of its user
programs, such as vi. See Salus, The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin, A Tale of Two
Editors
157
Stallman, Free Software, Free Society, Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation.
155

62

for Stallman is that since the Symbolics episode he saw a correlation between the free circulation and complete access to eventual source codechanges, with the strength of a hacker community busy working on such
source code. As a result, he must, under these circumstances, create alicense which, unlike the BSD license, must enforce sharing, to force thecreation of social software at all costs. This is why for Stallman a specific
new license must be created and applied to a new Unix software, which
is detached from its historical codebase. This is an history he does notseem to feel too attached to however, given that his interest in Unix was
not particularly acute to begin with.158

1.10 From Machine Instructions to Community
Rules
If nowadays free and open source software groups are probably, as Coleman rightly points out, “the largest single association of amateur intellectual property and free speech legal scholars ever to have existed,”159 it
was not always the case. In fact, this too had to go through some heavy
phases of prototyping, as the pre FSF software freedom that Stallman often refers to, can also be understood through the fact that hackers likehimself did not think much of software as intellectual property, let alone
had they any clue of how it actually worked. This was particularly vis-

158
159

Stallman, “The GNU Manifesto,” Why GNU Will Be Compatible with Unix.
Gabriella Coleman, “Code Is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest Among
Free and Open Source Software Developers,” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 3 (2009):
433.

63

ible in the very messy early years of the EMACS family of text editor
programs, the bits and pieces of which were assembled and distributed
in different ways. This situation led to several conflicts and discussions
around the intellectual property nature of the software, and notably therather casual exchange and appropriation of source code regardless of its
copyright, or copyright laws for that matter.160 If in the later years Stallman seems to be quite casual when retelling this episode, it was in facta rather unpleasant process, that once again forced him to take action sothat his notion of community could stand on solid legal ground. Whenhe announced the GPL in 1988, it was in fact a fusion and generalisationof different individual licenses that he associated with each of the early
GNU software components, a result of experiments with a series of prototypical licenses such as the GCC General Public License, and the GNU
Emacs General Public License.

The copyleft used by the GNU project is made from a combination ofa copyright notice and the GNU General Public License. The copyright notice is the usual kind. The General Public License is a copying license which basically says that you have the freedoms we want
you to have and that you can’t take these freedoms away from anyone else. (The actual document consists of several pages of rather
complicated legalese that our lawyer said we needed.) A copy ofthe complete license is included in all GNU source code distributions and many manuals, and we will send you a printed copy on
request.161

It makes sure that software freedom and openness are ensured once thesoftware is published, and at the same time provides legal mechanisms

160
161

Kelty, Two Bits, Writing Copyright Licenses.
Richard M. Stallman, “What Is Copyleft?” GNU’s Bulletin 1, no. 6 (1988).

64

to discourage a break in the terms of the license. You may remember
user Richard, from section 1.6 of this chapter, was bothered and annoyedby the fact that user Friedrich denied him access to the source file ofhis software—maybe because user Ada had licensed it to him under thepermissive terms of the early BSD license—he now decides to rewrite
said software from scratch, and adds a new feature that matters to him
and would have been cumbersome to implement via reverse engineering.
His new software.c source file looks like this:/* software - my free software* (C) Copyright 2017 - Richard** This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or* modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License* as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3* of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
** This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the* GNU General Public License for more details.
** You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public* License along with this program. If not,* see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
*/#include <stdio.h>
int main(void){puts(”There is no software.”);puts(”There is only free software.”);}Here Richard avoids potential copyright infrigement by implementing the software function differently from Friedrich’s and Ana’s original65

source code. Alongside this, he marks his source code with a disclaimer
explaining the type of software it is, and finally, includes another text file,the GPL, which are simply the legal distribution terms that implements
the FSF software freedom. Any user deciding to publish this software in
the future, must comply with its terms,162 namely that the distributionof the software must always be done with access to its source code, including any modifications made to the latter: the copyleft mechanism isborn. In practice, with copyleft licenses, if Friedrich then decides to use
Richard’s software and modifies it before sharing the new version on his
website, he must also provide the source code and must guarantee thesame terms to the users of his version, unlike with permissive licenses
that allow closed source and proprietary integration and distribution. It
is very important to understand that the copyleft principle is absolutely
not a mandatory characteristic of free software, but a property of somefree software licenses.163
But most importantly here, with such a marked file and unlike Chun’s

162

See Aaron Williamson Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler, “A Practical Guide to
GPL Compliance,” White Paper (Software Freedom Law Center, 2008).
163
Similarly, the FSF distinguishes GPL-compatible and GPL-incompatible licenses, todistinguish source code that can or cannot be merged with GPL licensed source files,
and vice versa. To give an example, the initial 1998 4-clause BSD License is considered by the FSF to be a free software license but it is non-copyleft and incompatible
with the GPL. But more recent evolutions of the BSD license, eventually became GPL
compatible, like the FreeBSD license, despite still being a permissive non-copyleft license. So while the FSF strongly encourages the use of copyleft licenses, it also recognizes a whole range of licences. Notable other free software licenses are the Apache
License, the CC0 license, the FreeBSD license, the BitTorrent Open Source License,
the Mozilla Public License, the Microsoft Public License, the Do What the Fuck You
Want To Public License. See Free Software Foundation, “Various Licenses and Comments About Them,” 2016, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html. The
two aims of the definition are thus: first it establishes what in Stallman’s terms software freedom means; and second, it is a test to validate whether or not a license canbe called a free software license.

66

investigation of the notion of source code, where the latter is reduced to
an intermediary spectre that only becomes the source of an action once
it is turned into an executable,164 software source code as exemplified
with free software source code, does not even need to be executed tobe performative. Chun admits that the English-based commands foundin source code also means that it can be read by other people than programmers. She takes works from artists such as Mez Breeze and Graham
Harwood to illustrate how this can be taken advantage of in an artistic
context.165 I could not agree more here, and this cross-readability, bymachine and human parsers, has been most notably the root of the code
poetry genre, where the principles of poetry and computer code are purposefully conflated.166 However, Chun overlooks other aspects of source
files and source code, and more particularly the comments, as paratextual place holders for other forms of human instructions and manipulation that have the power to change and control the contextual interpretation of software execution well outside the machine itself. A similar
missed opportunity can be found in the writing of American writer andcomputer programer Alexander R. Galloway, whose focus on the technological context of code,167 overshadows the openness of the paratextual
marks carried by the later and fails to notice the dominance of anotherprotocol, albeit a more historical one: free software as a social étiquette. It
is expressed here with Stallman’s own understanding of the hacker ethics

164

Chun, Programmed Visions, 24–25.
See ibid., 55–56.
166
See Cramer, Words Made Flesh, 93–95.
167
Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 171.
16567

as one of sharing communities, and such ethical social protocol can now
be enforced via the simple act of source code distribution.
So far, I have purposefully delayed the introduction of the term community. Nowadays it is taken for granted from popular Internet culture
and also academic literature that any social groups operating via computer mediated communication systems can be referred to as a community.168 The term gained notable mainstream popularity with American
writer Howard Rheingold’s 1993 prophetic work on the concept of virtual
communities.169 From his own participation in several electronic chatting, interactive, and discussion platforms,170 as well as building uponearly nineties social science research,171 he draws an analogy between socalled real world communities and the social organisation of individuals
who cluster around different technologically driven communication systems. Referring more particularly to fieldwork in The WELL from American sociologist Marc Smith,172 he uses the schema of collective goods tosupport his comparison. However, the idea of linking communication
technology, commonness and community is not novel, and its history,
promises and downfall have been extensively covered by American communication theorist James W. Carey in his 1989 work Communication

168

See Steven G. Jones, CyberSociety 2.0 : Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication
and Community (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998).
169
Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community : Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier(1993; repr., Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
170
Such as the 1985 forum Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (The WELL), and also Internet
Relay Chat (IRC) channels, and Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs).
171
In particular from Amy Bruckman, Marc Smith, and Elizabeth M. Reid. For detailedreferences, see ibid., Bibliography.
172
Marc Smith, “Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons” (Master’s
thesis, University of California, 1992).

68

as Culture, where he traced amongst other things the path that led tothe mythos of the electronic revolution in which new forms of community would arise,173 and similar connections can be found in BSD history
which has been linked with the mid 60s Free Speech Movement.174
By bridging social organisation with operating systems, and making
the protocols of software access, compilation, execution, and distribution dual, free software source code challenges the notion of openness
as a purely technological network oriented idea. Here, I am not being
metaphorical, free software source code is a mix of human and machine
semantics that target more than computer compilers, it also gives instructions to human interpreters by the means of its legal apparatus, it becomes a method to directly program the actors of the free society envisioned by Stallman with the help of intellectual property laws. Therefore Stallman’s understanding of community is not only in the lineageof Carey’s mythos, it is also a method by which to thoroughly structure these communities. Even before the Symbolics instalment, an important contribution was made by Stallman to the EMACS editor, next
to his central role in its infancy and development,175 was the notion of
EMACS Commune articulated in late seventies documentation of the software, in which the project was presented as a sharing community operating according to some prototypical copyleft rules,176 however not yet
expressed in legal terms. When free software becomes more precisely

173

Carey, Communication as Culture, The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution.
Leonard, “BSD Unix.”175
Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software (2002;
repr., Farnham: O’Reilly, 2012), Chapter 6: The Emacs Commune.
176
Levy, Hackers, 417.
174

69

formulated, the combination of a sort of civil rights organisation, like the
FSF, proposing a software definition and matching licenses, like the GPL,is not only a legal framework, but also a toolkit for community rules, asort of cybernetic law model for any virtual community with GNU and
the FSF providing an exemplification of such methodology. So when different voices emerge from the early days of the free software versus open
source schism, the overlap in licensing should not be misunderstood as
the growth of a social movement. In effect, it is the beginning of a processof fragmentation of software freedom, into all sorts of diverging communities. This was particularly visible in the results and discussions that
followed the first Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) survey in
2002.177 However, at the time, Stallman disagreed with some of the report findings, and in particular how it presented the existence of two
communities, whereas he considered free and open source software to be
two movements within one single community.178 His request to rephrase
and replace community with movement was ultimately declined.179
If I look at free software from the perspective of the Gemeinschaft andGesellschaft dichotomy, developed by German Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies,180 the sense of fellowship and bounding found in the early computer

177

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh and Ruediger Glott, “Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study,” research report (International Institute of Infonomics, 2002).
178
Ibid., The Stallman-Ghosh-Glott mail exchange on the FLOSS survey: Two communities or two movements in one community?
179
Ibid.
180
In 1887, Tönnies provides a conceptual framework, in the form of an idealised generalisation, in which he suggests that social organisation can be split into two groups:
the Gemeinschaft, which is the community where relationships between individuals
are structured by traditional social conventions; and the Gesellschaft, which is the society where these relationships are instead fabricated to fulfil a particular plan. See
Tönnies, Community and Civil Society.

70hacking groups are the essential drive of a Gemeinschaft. But, the satisfaction of being part of a community, subjectively connected to the socalled hacker ethic, disappears with the increasing technical and social
alienation brought about by the changes in the computer industry. From
the resulting isolation rises a new strength, Stallman’s will to rally otherhackers around a new speculative or utopian agenda, a Gesellschaft in
the form of a free society, the rules of which are put in place to emulate
his lost Gemeinschaft,181 and therefore engage with a conflict against theother Gesellschaften he claims are responsible for this loss.182
Even though Stallman once thought of himself in 1983 as being the“last of the true hackers,”183 with free software he creates much more thana copyright hack,184 becoming the first hacker to transcend the pejorativedescription of “computer bums,”185 who in the seventies and in the eyesof Weizenbaum, were for the most part, skilful yet aimless technicians,
who could not set long-term goals.186 Stallman does not set GNU’s andthe FSF long-term goals as philanthropic activity. He is forced to. Something got in the way of his main occupation and he will try to solve it
the same way he hacks software. But in the process, the system he puts
in place to emulate and compensate his loss, becomes a guideline avail-181

This effort was also prototyped with the Emacs Commune experiment, which is how
Stallman drafted his first social contract, by embedding sharing terms in the sourcecode from Emacs. See Williams, Free as in Freedom, Chapter 6: The Emacs Commune;
Kelty, Two Bits, 189
182
In some of the next chapters, I will develop further the relationship between communities, societies, and licenses, and the consequence of such an emulation in thecontext of dual, and triple licensing.
183
Levy, Hackers, 415.
184
Kelty, Two Bits, 182.
185
Williams, Free as in Freedom, 124.
186
Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 118.

71

able for any lost, endangered, imaginary, nostalgic, novel, or speculative
Gemeinschaften.

72

Interlude
As shown in the previous chapter, free software is not so much of a revolutionary thing, which is to say it is not a paradigm shift in the way software is produced. Similarly, this seminal notion that software freedom
is essentially the articulation of an opposition towards closed source andproprietary practices is only one side of the story. To be sure, it is not
my intention to undermine the work of Stallman, but I do believe thatthe most interesting aspect of the free software story is that of the creation of a thorough techno-legal structure for virtual communities, that
goes well beyond the question of online platforms as the term often implies. In that sense free software is the containment and protection ofpractices idealised by Stallman, they are emulations, because they enablegenuine modes of organisation and production that are embellished by
Stallman’s own ethics and ideals, partly experienced and partly derived
from the magical recovery1 of the early computer programming communities, while being at the same time tightly contained in a construction

1

In reference to John Clarke, “The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of the Community,” in Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart
Hall and Tony Jefferson (1976; repr., London: Routledge, 2006).

73

made of software and legal code.
In the next chapter, Chapter 2, I will argue that the perception of free
software as such a model, template even, is the reason it became widelyadopted by groups whose interests could not be formulated and controlled within existing techno-legal frameworks. This is also why thisprocess of diffusion quickly escaped the realm of software because what
is being produced does not matter any more, as long as it can be expressedwith the system definition-licenses inspired by free software. As a result the notion of culture itself will also become rationalised in the same
techno-legal fashion. However, I will argue that what first appears to be
an interesting model for pluralism in a system that mirrors the dynamics of liberal democracy, the broad diffusion of this system, will start toshow its limits when its commonness is challenged by the conflict between the different ideologies that have appropriated the free software
techno-legal methodology. In particular, I will explain that if such pluralism had been founded on a consensus about cultural freedom and openness, the fact that these were however interprated differently meant thatthe free and open source family of things was closer to an imagined community 2 rather than a coherent whole, or single community, as Stallman
believed so.3
To develop my argument I will first look at the early diffusion of the2
3

Benedict R O’G Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism (1991; repr., London: Verso, 2006).
Ghosh and Glott, “Free/Libre and Open Source Software,” The Stallman-Ghosh-Glottmail exchange on the FLOSS survey: Two communities or two movements in one
community?

74

free software model into non-software things, and how the process leads
to a growing distance from matters that were so far specific to computational culture. I will frame this active diffusion and proliferation of
new definitions and licenses as a positive sign of pluralistic activities,
and make a connection with the concept of radical democracy.4 I willthen discuss that even though the cultural diffusion of free software will
eventually reach domains that seem unrelated, the nature of the template,most notably its origin in prototyping and engineering culture, will remain consistent and applied to every subject. Finally I will analyse themoment in which some of these definitions and licenses ended up morethoroughly categorised, filtered, aggregated and defined, and the consequence it has on pluralism and the wide diversity of ideologies that appropriated the free software template, more particularly looking at thefield of open design and the makers movement as an illustration of myargument.

4

See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

75

Chapter 2
In Search of Pluralism

2.1

Diffusion and Appropriation

The first attempts to apply the free software model into a non-software
context, came naturally from fields where free software ideas had been
circulated, namely computer science. One of the earliest example that
I could find is the 1994 Free Music Philosophy (FMP), by musician andcomputational biologist Ram Samudrala, who then defined the project asfollowing:
What is the Free Music Philosophy (FMP)?
It is an anarchistic grass-roots, but high tech, system of spreading
music: the idea that creating, copying, and distributing music must
be as unrestricted as breathing air, plucking a blade of grass, or basking in the rays of the sun.
What does it mean to use the term “Free Music”?
The idea is similar to the notion of Free Software, and like with Free
Software, the word “free” refers to freedom, not price. Specifically,

76

Free Music means that any individual has the freedom of copying,
distributing, and modifying music for personal, noncommercial purposes. Free Music does not mean that musicians cannot charge forrecords, tapes, CDs, or DATs.1

As for the distribution terms, they are quite crude but partly mimic
free software licensing, except for the commercial use:
Permission to copy, modify, and distribute the musical compositions
and sound recordings on this album, provided this notice is included
with every copy that is made, is given for noncommercial use. If you
obtained this by making a copy, and if you find value in this music
and wish to support it, please send a donation based on whatever
you thought the music was worth to the address given on this notice.2

The other important example of such appropriation was with Michael
Stutz, one of the first writers and journalists reporting on Linux and open
source, who in the mid nineties published his entire website including
his clip art gallery under the GPL,3 and was, also as early as 1994, thefirst to use the GPL outside the scope of software.4 He explained thatanyone deserved the freedom provided by the copyleft license, and that it
represented a “resource for all artists and scientists who work with digital
information.”5 In his short 1997 electronic essay Applying Copyleft To

1
2
3
4

5

Ram Samudrala, “The Free Music Philosophy,” 1994, https://web.archive.org/web/
19970101121210/http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp.html.
Ibid.
Michael Stutz, “DESIGN SCIENCE LABS CLIP ART LIBRARY,” 1997, https://web.
archive.org/web/19970213052359/http://dsl.org/cal.html.
Antoine Moreau, “Le Copyleft Appliqué à La Création Hors Logiciel. Une Reformulation Des Données Culturelles ?” (PhD thesis, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis. École
Doctorale Lettres, Sciences Humaines et Sociales. Sciences de l’Information et de laCommunication, 2011), 473.
https://web.archive.org/web/
MichaelStutz,“/Doc/Comp/Gnu/,”
1997,
19970617151849/http://www.dsl.org/m/doc/comp/gnu/.

77Non-Software Information, he justified his choice by saying that “certain
restrictions of copyright - such as distribution and modification - are notvery useful to ‘cyberia,’ the ‘free, apolitical, democratic community’ that
constitutes the internetworked digital world.”6 At the time he believedthat the GPL provided the answer to the issue for software matters andnoted that “it appears that the same License can be easily applied to nonsoftware information.”7
But if the GPL seemed adequate at first, as the diffusion of free andopen source software licensing progressed, the need for the licensing ofother things than software became more prominent. So 1998 saw thebirth of another effort to provide a more articulated licensing option for
non-software works. In that year, with the help of Stallman and Raymond, David A. Wiley, who was at that time working on a doctoral degree in Instructional Psychology and Technology at the Brigham Young
University, tweaked the GPL and released the OpenContent License. The
incentive for Wiley to release this license stemmed from his personal desire to share his teaching material, so they can be reused by others, circulated for free, and also be properly attributed and responsibly modified.8
The idea to create a general license that made the bridge between thefree software philosophy beyond software itself was a novelty, and was
one step further from the fist landmark established with the FMP terms

6
78Michael Stutz, “Applying Copyleft to Non-Software Information,” 1997, http://www.
gnu.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.en.html.
Ibid.
Lev Grossman, “New Free License to Cover Content Online,” Time, 1998,
http://web.archive.org/web/20001010034324/http://www.time.com/time/digital/
daily/0,2822,621,00.html.

78

in 1994. Lev Grossman who interviewed Wiley for Time magazine concluded his column wondering whether or not free content, “open-source[sic]” novels and free concept albums would one day take over the world.
But Wiley’s effort were not isolated. In fact as early as 1998, each intheir respective domains, artists, musicians, designers, activists, scientists, had started to write their own licenses, for works distributed mostof the time on a border-less Internet, yet attached to localised concernsand jurisdictions. For instance the following licenses reflected on theideas of freedom and openness within their own practice, often with agrowing distance from the free and open source software context:• the OpenContent License (1998);• the Licence Publique Audiovisuelle (1998);• the Licence Association des Bibliophiles Universels (1999);• the Comprehensive Open Licence (1999);• the Counter Copyright notice (1999);• the Design Science License (1999);• the Free Document Dissemination Licence (1999);• the GNU Free Documentation License (1999);• the IDGB Open Book Open Content License (1999);• the License Publique Multimedia (1999);• the Linux Documentation Project Copying License (1999);• the Open Publication License (1999);• the Open Directory License (1999);• the Open Resources Magazine License (1999);• the W3C Document Notice (1999);• the Ethymonics Free Music Licence (2000);• the Free Art License (2000);• the Freedom CPU Charter (2000);• the GNU Free Documentation License (2000);• the Licence ludique générale (2000);• the Licence pour Documents Libres (2000);• the Licence Publique de Traduction (2000);• the Open Game License (2000);• the Trackers Public License (2000);• the Common Documentation License (2001);• the EFF Open Audio License (2001);79

• the HyperNietzsche Licenses (2001);• the Open Music Licenses (2001);• the Simputer General Public License (2001);• the Academic Free License (2002);• the CopID notice (2002);• the Mnémosyne Free Dissemination License (2002).9The amount of novelty licenses created just within four years, shows
the highly active cultural diffusion occurring at the time. Stutz, who defended the use of GPL for non-software, will also eventually abandon theemblematic FSF license and write his own Design and Science License in
1999.10 The peculiarity of all these endeavours, is in the fact that they
are all driven by different understandings of what freedom and openness
means in the context of culture and knowledge.11 Even though it would
be quite a daunting effort to precisely analyse each of these in order tounderstand these differences, in Chapter 3 I will take the 2000 Free Art
License (FAL) as a case study, in order to show how the cultural depth
and the ramification of the community template of free and open source
software actually works when it is claimed by other groups, ideologies
and practices. So essentially, all these licenses are efforts to claim a semantic territory, a particular definition of cultural freedom and the words
that can be used to articulate it. Ultimately, this snowball effect demonstrates the victory of Stallman to transform how licensing is perceived:

9

For the full text of these licenses, as well as a short explanation about the selection,
see Appendix: Selection of Proto-Free Culture Licenses.
10
See Michael Stutz, “Open Source Beyond Software,” 2000, https://web.archive.org/
web/20000815061009/http://oreilly.linux.com/pub/a/linux/2000/08/01/LivingLinux.
html.
11
Not to mention its commercial and non-commercial implication, which is anothercan of worms I will briefly open and then attempt to close in the second part of thethesis.

80

the inhibitory aspect of the license now becomes an expressive tool toempower and materialise various ideologies. As a result though, the sudden growth in cultural scope, urge the need to guide, make sense of, andhelp navigate within all these new free and open groups and efforts.12
As pointed out with early and later critiques of license proliferation,13
the noise created from all these subcultural groups is not necessarily apositive mechanism of semantic disorder.14 However, all these licenses
become effectively new language-games with accidental family resemblances,15 and help enrich discussion around cultural freedom. Said differently, beyond the apparent common universality that seem to connect
them under the umbrella of openness and freedom, they each have their
distinctive features, as a result of adapting to their needs the free andsource software template. So if such a pluralistic approach to cultural
freedom and openness appears to mimic the dynamics of liberal democracy, its discursive mechanism as a whole does not belong however to theprinciple of aggregation, where voting is linked to free market economics
by giving the ability to the individual to choose for societal matters,16
neither it fits with the principle of deliberation, that gives preference to

12

For instance Lawrence Liang, Guide to Open Content Licenses (Rotterdam: Piet Zwart
Institute, Institute for Postgraduate Studies; Research, Willem de Kooning Academy,
2005).
13
Laura Majerus (chair) and the members of the LP Committee, “Report of License
Proliferation Committee,” research report (Open Source Initiative, 2006), https://web.
archive.org/web/20070719020858/http://www.opensource.org/proliferation-report.
14
Hebdige, Subculture, 90.
15
In reference to the concepts from Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953; repr., Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1986).
16
Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957; repr., Boston: Addison
Wesley, 2001); Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1950;
repr., London: Routledge, 2005).

81discussion and debate in the form of public discourse ethics.17
In fact, and I will return to this point several time throughout this thesis, this particular phenomena could be best explained under the modelof radical democracy, coined by political theorists Ernesto Laclau andChantal Mouffe,18 and more precisely the model of agonistic pluralism.19
By this, and rephrasing Mouffe’s description in the context of this apparent balkanisation of licensing, I mean to say that through the lensof agonistic pluralism, the sudden proliferation of licenses is not a byproduct of competition, but instead the emergence of identity politics
within the not so diverse cultural context of free and open source communities. By rallying under several new licenses, these different groups
have been able to cohabit, and as a whole, all these endeavours should
therefore be understood as the interaction between several political adversaries, treating each other, and this is very important, as legitimate
opponents on the common ground that is cultural liberty and equality,and yet disagreeing on the way to implement it.20 What is more, and to be
sure, such passionate disagreements cannot be resolved with deliberation
and rationale discussion,21 and this is fine and indispensable, as according to this model, democratic systems depends on the multiplication of
discourse, and the diversity of language-games and their matching organisations, collectives, institutions, which are illustrated in this sub-section

17

See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theoryof Law and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
18
Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
19
Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Model of Democracy (2000).”
20
Ibid., 203.
21
Ibid., 203.

82

and later on in this thesis.
Under such a model, I want to stress that it becomes therefore questionable that critiques of license proliferation and incompatibility between
these documents, are universally representative attempts to protect cultural freedom and openness as a whole. The same can be said more generally of the copyright atomism that results from the ever increasing proliferation, distribution, and fragmentation of copyright.22 Instead, these
critiques should be best understood as the expression of threatened hegemonic forces.

2.2

Prototyping Free Culture

In 2002, an important change is about to happen. Even though both theimpressive legal literacy acquired,23 and the collective intelligence produced, by all the participants of the rapidly expanding field of all things
free and open, has allowed for the writing of all sorts of licenses, the realprofessionals of the law are about to step into these communities of practices, thereby threatening not only the existence of such communities,
but also the ability to establish common questions and reflect collectively
about these.24

22

See Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, “Author, Autonomy, and Atomism in Copyright
Law,” Virginia Law Review 96, no. 3 (2010).
23
Coleman, “Code Is Speech,” 433.
24
Isabelle Stengers, Au Temps Des Catastrophes: Résister À La Barbarie Qui Vient (Paris:
La Découverte, 2009), 119, p. 177.

83

The professional argument is that even though anyone is free to write
their own license, it is a whole different story to make sure the license
is actually a legally sound document, which could effectively be useful if
ever challenged in relation to intellectual property laws. So in this logic
and given the growing jungle of licenses, the documents that would comefrom the work and research of lawyers and law scholars should have intheory a better chance of receiving public attention. This is the claim andthe bet taken in 2002 by the San Francisco based Creative Commons (CC)nonprofit organisation, which was started to provide a more generic approach to the issue of openness in culture. Unlike the free software modelin which the GNU Manifesto, had set the ethical tone and direction forsoftware freedoms and which eventually led to the creation of the GPL,
CC further embraced the strategy of economics by providing, without
substantial explanation, a collection of licenses to fit, according to them,every purpose. In regard to license proliferation to which such action
clearly contributes, CC did not acknowledge any other effort but that of
the FSF, and positioned itself as a complementary effort, not a competitive one, that would focus on scholarship, film, literature, music, photography, and other kinds of creative works,25 basically all the domains inwhich free and open source software licenses, and derivatives, had been
embraced since 1998.
There is of course a paradox in acknowledging on the one hand the pluralistic nature of licensing, and on the other hand ignoring four years of25

Creative Commons, “faq,” 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20020518124323/http://
www.creativecommons.org/faq/.

84the effective agonistic pluralism described earlier. As a result, the question of identifying and organising family resemblances across all thesecommunities stopped being accidental, and became instead a necessarymeans of survival, for those who could not identify themselves with theaggregative model offered by CC. As a matter of fact, this meta discursivity operating on top of licenses, had already started in 2001 with theconcept of Open Source Intelligence (OSI)—not to be misunderstood with
the Open Source Initiave (OSI) mentioned previously—which connected
the free and open source software collaborative framework in the broader
context of net culture:

In the world of spies and spooks, Open Source Intelligence (OSI) signifies useful information gleaned from public sources, such as newspapers, phone books and price lists. We use the term differently. For
us, OSI is the application of collaborative principles developed by
the Open Source Software movement to the gathering and analysis
of information. These principles include: peer review, reputationrather than sanctions-based authority, the free sharing of products,
and flexible levels of involvement and responsibility. […] Projects
like the Nettime e-mail list, Wikipedia and the NoLogo.org website
each have distinct history that led them to develop different technical and social strategies, and to realize some or all of the open source
collaborative principles.26

The same year, the community behind the Manifesto de Hipatia, who
would also go beyond the original scope of user freedom and cooperation to link the free software philosophy to social and political activism
through the value of knowledge access:26

Felix Stalder and Jesse Hirsh, “Open Source Intelligence,” 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/20021010023528/http://news.openflows.org/article.pl?
sid=02/04/23/1518208.

85

We propose the creation of a world-wide, popular, democratic organisation to promote the adoption of public policies combined withhuman and social behaviour that favour the free availability and sustainability of, and social access to, technology and knowledge; theiruse for the common good; and the viability of the economic model
which creates them, in terms of the equality and inclusion of all human beings and all peoples of the world.27

Eventually several initiatives offered their own proto-free culture definitions. For example, the 2003 “four kinds of free knowledge” by Spanish
scholar Ismael Peña-López attempted to make a direct transposition between software freedom and knowledge:• The freedom to use the knowledge, for any purpose (freedom0).
• The freedom to study how the knowledge applies, and adapt it
to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source information isa precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute knowledge so you can help yourneighbour (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the knowledge, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source information is a precondition for this.28

Another effort focussed instead on the idea of openness: the Open
Knowledge Definition (OKD). The later is one of the projects of the Open
Knowledge Foundation (OKF), a nonprofit organisation founded in 2004
by Rufus Pollock, Martin Keegan, and Jo Walsh. It was created to promote“the openness of knowledge in all its forms, in the belief that greater ac-

27

Mario Luiz Teza Teza et al., “Manifiesto de Hipatia,” 2001, http://www.hipatia.net/
index.php?id=manifesto_es.
28Ismael Peña-López, “The Four Kinds of Freedom of Free Knowledge,” 2003, http://
ictlogy.net/20031030-the-four-kinds-of-freedom-of-free-knowledge/.

86

cess to information will have far-reaching social and economic benefits.”29
Their approach was originally based on what they call the three meaningsof open: legally open, socially open, and technologically open. Unlike
other initiatives that proudly exhibited their wishful affiliation with the
FSF, the OKF instead affiliated itself with the OSI and the Open Accessmovement. And, just like the other groups critical of proliferation, it ison a mission to set the record straight when it comes to openness:

The concept of openness has already started to spread rapidly beyond its original roots in academia and software. We already have‘open access’ journals, open genetics, open geodata, open content
etc. As the concept spreads so we are seeing a proliferation of licenses and a potential blurring of what is open and what is not.
In such circumstances it is important to preserve compatibility,
guard against dilution of the concept, and provide a common
thread to this multitude of activities across a variety of disciplines.
The definition, by providing clear set of criteria for openness, is an
essential tool in achieving these ends.30

As might be expected, the OKF itself is thus directly derived from
Perens’ Open Source definition. The first version, v0.1, was drafted inAugust 2005 and v1.0 was released in July 2006. For the OKF to decide if
a work is open or not, the latter must respect the following definition:

1. Access2. Redistribution
3. Re-Use
4. Absence of Technological Restriction

29

Open Knowledge Foundation, “Home Page,” 2005, http://web.archive.org/web/20050209143117/http://www.openknowledgefoundation.org/.
30
Open Knowledge Foundation, “About - Open Knowledge Definition,” 2006, http://
web.archive.org/web/20060819200710/http://okd.okfn.org/about.

87

5. Attribution
6. Integrity
7. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
8. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
9. Distribution of License
10. License Must Not Be Specific to a Package
11. License Must Not Restrict the Distribution of Other Works31

At the time, the OKF definition, or OKD, “sets forth principles by which
to judge whether a knowledge license is open” and “does not seek toprovide or recommend specific licenses.”32 However they did mention
that their wiki contained a license survey, and before the end of 2006 a
new entry was added to the project website: “Conformant Licenses.”33
Later on, in 2007, another adaptation of software freedom, theFree/Libre Knowledge definition, is released by the Free Knowledge
Foundation (FKF), yet another group that clearly stands on a different
ground from the one claimed by the OKF.

(0) use the work for any purpose(1) study its mechanisms, to be able to modify and adapt it to theirown needs(2) make and distribute copies, in whole or in part(3) enhance and/or extend the work and share the result.34

31

Open Knowledge Foundation, “OpenKnowledgeDefinition - Open Knowledge
Foundation Wiki,” 2006, http://web.archive.org/web/20060517215509/http://okfn.
org/wiki/OpenKnowledgeDefinition.
32
Open Knowledge Foundation, “The Open Knowledge Foundation - Open Knowledge Definition - Home” (Open Knowledge Foundation, 2006), http://web.archive.
org/web/20060721021510/http://www.openknowledgefoundation.org/okd/.
33
In 2006, the licenses that could qualify as Open Knowledge licenses were: the GNU
Free Documentation License, the Free Art License, the Creative Commons Attribution License, the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike and the Design Science
License.
34
Free Knowledge Foundation, “Libre Declaration,” 2007, http://web.archive.org/web/20081120001221/http://www.libre.org/communities/philosophy/libre-declaration.

88

Also worth mentioning was the definition from Willey in 2007, who
had previously authored the OpenContent license. In this attempt, Wiley
made a stronger distinction between rework and remix. It is also a twist
on the four software freedoms, and in this case it has been renamed to
the “4Rs Framework:”
Reuse – Use the work verbatim, just exactly as you found it
Revise – Alter or transform the work so that it better meets yourneeds
Remix – Combine the (verbatim or altered) work with other works
to better meet your needs
Redistribute – Share the verbatim work, the reworked work, or theremixed work with others35

Next to the multiplication of definitions, the cultural diffusion discussed in this section shows that different readings of the free software
template are possible. An important point of divergence, and close to
the spirit of the Manifesto de Hipatia and the Open Source Intelligenceconcept, is to interprete the free software template as a model forlarge-scale productive social relations where generous collaboration
can take place,36 and not just a more effective and liberal form ofefficient production and sharing. As early as 2002, projects such as
the Brazillian network MetaReciclagem put forth the materialisation ofcritical appropriation of technologies for social change37 in which DIY,
copyleft, and consensus-based decision-making, helped approach free

35

David Willey, “Open Education License Draft,” 2007, http://opencontent.org/blog/
archives/355.
36
Fabianne Balvedi, “Free Studios,” in FLOSS+Art, ed. Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes
de Valk (Poitiers: GOTO10, 2008).
37
Felipe Fonseca, “Gambiarra: Repair Culture,” 2015, https://efeefe-arquivo.github.io/
livro/repair-culture/gambiarra/.

89

and open source software as a “cultural and critical take on the pervasiveness of relationships mediated only by economic values.”38 Similarly,
this social dimension was also a deciding element in the creation of
the Estúdio Livre project in 2005, a collaborative Brazilian Portuguese
speaking network with a focus on the “breaking down of barriers
between producer and consumer as an example of collective intelligenceas well as of changes in aesthetic, economic and social paradigms incontemporary society.”39 Generally speaking, this proto-free cultureera, saw the emergence of what Chilean sound artist Alejandra Maria
Perez Nuñez called the southern time of free and open source software.40
Inspired by the Rhythmanalysis collection of essays from French Marxist
philosopher Henri Lefebvre,41 she expressed the role of free and open
source software in forging a culture that goes beyond software andexist outside of the “economical time of unlimited profit”;42 where new
ways of learning, creating, and participating, offer an alternative toa dominant productive model of time. To be sure, and as noted by
the artist, this southern time was “not so much about geographicallocations as about frames of mind […] that determines what is conceived
as south,”43 and this approach to free culture was thereby also sharedin European hacklabs, art collectives and argumented critically in the

38

Ibid.
Balvedi, “Free Studios,” 263.
40
Alejandra Maria Perez Nuñez, “FLOSS, It’s Relation to Southern Time,” in FLOSS+Art,
ed. Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk (Poitiers: GOTO10, 2008).
41
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (1992; repr., London:
Continuum, 2004).
42
Nuñez, “FLOSS, It’s Relation to Southern Time,” 281.
43
Ibid., 281.
39

90

context of network politics.44 Towards the end of the noughthies, freeculture was therefore more than a chaotic collection of definitions andlicenses, it was also the concrete manifestation of different ideas aboutsociety, structured and grounded by the free software template.

2.3

Defining Free Culture and the Decay of
Pluralism

Today’s most recognised definition is not to be found in any of the efforts listed in the previous section. It is in fact the last one released inthis stream of prototyping: the 2008 definition for Free Cultural Works,
but which nonetheless found its infancy in discussions started three years
earlier. Indeed back in 2005, yet before the official release of the OKD, andin this context of growing concerns about the lack of uniformity for the
freedom of non-software things, free software activist Benjamin Mako
Hill started to openly criticise the definition-free approach offered by the“hodge-podge of pick-and-choose” features of CC licensing, indirectly addressing the limits of the undefined forms of engagement found in CC
co-founder Lawrence Lessig’s 2004 book, Free Culture, that I mentioned
in the introduction of this thesis.

[D]espite CC’s stated desire to learn from and build upon the example of the free software movement, CC sets no defined limits andpromises no freedoms, no rights, and no fixed qualities. Free software’s success is built upon an ethical position. CC sets no such

44

Fonseca, “Gambiarra.”

91

standard..45

As a self-fulfilling prophecy, this intention is carried on in a 2006 announcement from German freelance journalist Erik Möller and Hill himself, to work on such a missing definition:

In the free software world, the two primary definitions - the Free
Software Definition and the Open Source Definition - are both fairly
clear about what uses must be allowed. Free software can be freely
copied, modified, modified and copied, sold, taken apart and put
back together. However, no similar standard exists in the sphere offree content and free expressions.
We believe that the highest standard of freedom should be sought
for as many works as possible. And we seek to define this standardof freedom clearly. We call this definition the “Free Content andExpression Definition”, and we call works which are covered by thisdefinition “free content” or “free expressions.”46

This definition is written by several authors47 using a wiki,48 a MediaWiki installation to be precise, from the Wikipedia fame, and a powerful symbol of online collaborative writing dear to free and open source
software communities.49 In particular, the deliberative process follows
a system put in place by Möller, and relies on a model loosely inspired
from software production where a development branch co-exists with45

Benjamin Mako Hill, “Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons andthe Free Software Movement,” 2005, http://mako.cc/writing/toward_a_standard_of_
freedom.html.
46
Erik Möller and Benjamin Mako Hill, “Announcement,” 2006, http://freedomdefined.
org/Announcement.
47
Erik Möller, “Authoring Process,” 2006, http://freedomdefined.org/index.php?title=
Authoring_process&oldid=1303.
48
The OKD was also drafted on a wiki.
49
See Joseph Michael Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010).

92

a released branch. An invitation-only moderating group monitors thechanges made by the wiki users on a page where an unstable versionof the definition resides, and when consensus is felt to be reached on apoint, the particular change is applied at the discretion of the moderators
to the stable version of the definition.50 As the name already implies, thisdefinition is a transposition of the free software definition. According totheir Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), the definition applies to “worksof the human mind (and craft)”:• the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it• the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it• the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or inpart, of the information or expression• the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works51

Similar to the OKD, the free culture definition is introduced as being
different from a license.52 Instead it is presented as “a list of conditions
under which a work must be available in order to be considered ‘free’[and] a way to classify existing licenses.”53 Next to distinguish itself fromlicenses, the project also distances itself from the concept of manifesto, aform they qualify as “vague, broad, and very encompassing”. The project
aimed instead to provide a fixed reference point to free culture, one that50

For the latest list of moderators, see Erik Möller, Benjamin Mako Hill, Geraki, Spiritia,
Mormegil and Koavf, “Moderators,” 2015, http://freedomdefined.org/Moderators.
51
The Definition of Free Cultural Works project, “Definition of Free Cultural Works1.0,” 2007, http://freedomdefined.org/index.php?title=Definition&oldid=4582.
52
Erik Möller, “FAQ,” 2006, http://freedomdefined.org/index.php?title=FAQ&oldid=
1425.
53
Ibid.

93

could not be interpreted too freely, one that had to be restricted in orderto build a common language and set a landmark, yet not as formal as
legal code, hence the project name behind the definition: freedom defined.
And just like the OKD, the free cultural works definition had no specificlicenses to offer, but instead pointed to several already existing licenses
that allowed the application of the four freedoms to the licensed work or
expression. Similar to the licenses filtered by the FSF and the OSI, theoverlap between freedom defined approved and OKF approved licenses
is quite spectacular.54 This should not come as a surprise. Just as a pieceof GPL’ed source code can be independently articulated as either freeor open source software, the same double inflection is carried with freeculture and open knowledge. Hill,55 who did not know about the OKD
when he started to work with Möller, told me that there was some brief
discussions about merging the projects, but there was a few barriers to dothat. First, the specific naming and content of the free culture definition
had been extensively discussed with Stallman and the FSF, Lessig andCC, and Wikimedia, to make sure they would endorse the project, and ifthey had called it open knowledge definition Hill believed that would havemost likely lost some, probably all, of their support. Second, Between thetwo projects, there were too much structural and scope differences, with
the OKF lacking in particular a model for being responsive to a broader

54

In 2006, the licenses that were considered fitting the creation of free cultural works
are: Against DRM, Creative Commons Attribution, Creative Commons Attribution
ShareAlike, Design Science License, Free Art License, FreeBSD Documentation License, GNU Free Documentation License, GNU General Public License, MIT License.
Of the seven Creative Commons licenses at the time, only two qualified as free cultural licenses.
55
Email to author, October 9, 2015.

94

community interested in free open cultural concerns.
I previously argued that the state of free culture in its early undefinedand unnamed days, was neither of aggregative, nor deliberative nature,but had instead the potential to illustrate a successful model of agonistic pluralism and radical democracy in which conflict is not seen negatively, and where consensus is not blindly pursued. Borrowing the words
from law scholar Lawrence Liang, the licenses of the proto-free culture
era were more than legal documents, they were also “speech act[s].”56
However, this situation changed completely with the rise of CC and thefree culture definition, which suddenly permitted the two classical liberal democratic models to become once again dominant. Indeed, CC approached the licensing from an economic perspective, proposing theirown broad free market of different in-house professional licenses fromwhich copyright owners can choose, thereby building up some commonsin an aggregative way where voting and Darwinist survival mechanism
are put forth. At the opposite, the free culture definition built upon the
meritocratic position of its initiators and experts turned moderators, tocreate a sort of Habermassian deliberative open platform for the public
to contribute, and eventually establish a list of licenses the selection ofwhich is based on ethical concerns. But in both cases, the notion of consensus that was not a primary concern in the proto free culture era, now
becomes a tool for, respectively, an economic reform for immaterial property on the one hand, and on the other hand a contribution to the democratic narrative of the multitude, in which the common is constructed by

56

Liang, Guide to Open Content Licenses V1.2, 57.

95

spreading out singularities and where conflict is believed to become increasingly unnatural.57 This process came at a cost however, which isthe exclusion of all the groups the work of which did not match or did
not matter for these federative platforms, as well as the disempoweringof practicing communities, now guided by experts from the techno-legal
field.

2.4

The Political Denial of Open Everything
Free software movement was started in a capitalist society and has
always existed in a capitalist society, there is no incompatibility between free software and capitalism. […] We do not need to get rid
of capitalism. Free software combines capitalist ideas, and socialist
ideas, and anarchist ideas. It does not fit into any of those camps.58

It should become clear by now that free and open source software
movements and initiatives, as well as the free culture phenomenon asa whole, are symptomatic of contemporary politics in which the ideas ofcultural freedom and openness are stretched between on the one hand thepost-political need to embrace a sort of consensus driven liberal democracy,59 and on the other hand the diverging language games and family

57

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude : War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
58
RT, Richard Stallman: We’re Heading for a Total Disaster, Online video (San Bruno:
YouTube, 2012), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFMMXRoSxnA.
59
Which manifests itself with the aggregation of all these licenses and their respective
communities under diverse acronyms, such as Free/Libre and Open Source Software(FLOSS), see Ghosh and Glott, “Free/Libre and Open Source Software.”, as well aslabels and novel organisations related to all things open.

96resemblances of the groups which constitute these movements.60 It is thisparticular stretch that makes me wonder how to best approach the questions of commons and common ground, which has been made implicit or
explicit in all these projects. The point that I want to investigate here isthe consequence of a situation in which local disconnected singularities
claim, or pretend, or assume, or believe to belong to the same universality. In particular do these efforts create a common ground because they
are perceived to be able to fit within a universal consensus, or do theygenerate series of commons because they can be appropriated for radically plural purposes? Either way, the question of the political cannot
be easily dismissed, because it is the fundamental basis to articulate suchdifferences. Unlike the political agnosticism noted by American anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, to refer to the political denial that is bothinformed and reinforced by the cultural liberalism and the technological pragmatism of the free and open source software history,61 I believe
it is essential to acknowledge the direct political dimension of free andopen source things, and not fall into the trap of seeing them as operating
at a different level, or similarly, disconnected from passionate irrational
motives. Free and open source software, and hacking in general, is political.62 Sometimes the apolitical, or neutrality illusion is made stronger by
the groups themselves. In this case any discussion about the context of

60

Which are manifestation of all sorts of ideologies and attempts to contribute to acertain social order, with some of these visions sometimes compatible, sometimesnot.
61
Gabriella Coleman, “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software andthe Inadvertent Politics of Contrast,” Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2004).
62
Johan Söderberg, “Copyleft Vs. Copyright: A Marxist Critique,” First Monday 7, no.
3 (2002), http://firstmonday.org/article/view/938/860#s13.

97such free and open things reinforces the idea that the political dimension
is unproductive noise. For instance, in software developer mailing lists
and forums, the term semantics is often used in a derogative way to describe any potentially conflictual discussion, that is not articulated in apurely techno-rational fashion. Similarly, while Raymond disagrees with
Stallman’s tactics and rhetoric of free software, their opposition meetsup again in their extreme unclear positions, with Stallman unable to articulate a meaningful political interpretation for software freedom, andRaymond’s desire to simplify the free and open source software discourse
to a neutral technological debate63 and yet is hardly able to disguise his
libertarian agenda.64
To articulate my argument, I borrow from Mouffe, the definitions anddistinctions made by her between politics and the political,65 and I willargue that the denial and the refusal to consider the politics within the
different groups that constitute the ever expanding universe of free andopen things, has the tragic consequence of denying access to the politicalantagonism that, and still following Mouffe, is the essential constituent
of democracy. In particular there is an indispensable difference to bemade between a model of pluralism where a common bond exists, yet
in which conflictual collective identities can construct themselves by spe-

63

See Eric S. Raymond, “Shut up and Show Them the Code,” 1999, http://www.catb.org/
esr/writings/shut-up-and-show-them.html.
64Raymond, “A Response to Nikolai Bezroukov.”
65
Mouffe makes the distinction as follow: the political refers to the constitutive antagonist magnitude of human societies, while politics are the set of practices and institutions through which human order and organisation are founded in the context ofconflictuality provided by the political. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London:
Routledge, 2005), 9.

98

cific differentiation—which was the case with the messy unstructured butvery rich proto free culture—and a model where pluralism is consensuallysimulated because the common bond chosen is a one-size-fit-all collective
identity—which is the case for all the different efforts made to define freecultural practices, to aggregate, and to normalise them.66 The problem
with the second approach is two fold: first, it can only favour one typeof hegemony which will contribute to the shaping of such rationalisation
and where pluralism is just another word for competition; and second,which is also a consequence of the first point, it makes vulnerable, fragile,and open to exploitation the cultural diversity and social practices thatend up unknowingly mixed in the deceptive cultural blender of consensus.
To illustrate my argument I will now take a look at open design. I chose
this field precisely to give an example of how the notion of consensus in
free culture can backfire, and how the idea of a common public space andlanguage can prevent the we/they construction, which in turn leads to
deception for the actors of the less represented ideologies.
So what is open design precisely? In fact, it is precisely vague. Open
design is a term generally accepted to describe the open development oftangible objects.67 In the free culture family tree, it is one of its latest anddistant branches. It is a particularly interesting one for my demonstration

66

To be sure, the pluralism offered by CC also falls into this category as its palette oflicenses is nothing more but an ersatz of diversity.
67
Kerstin Balka, Christina Raasch, and Cornelius Herstatt, “Open Source Beyond Software: An Empirical Investigation of the Open Design Phenomenon,” R&D Management Conference, 2009, 14–16.

99because of the overlaps it has with several other family trees not necessarily linked to free culture itself. First of all, as the name might suggest,
open design is a concept derived from free and open source software practices, in the sense that it is an attempt to assimilate and integrate some
aspects of these practices, not for the making of digital things but forthe production of physical goods. Next to that, open design is also connected to a long history of participatory design practices, and is therefore
influenced by broad research and applications around users and communities in the fields of urban, architecture, product, and graphic design.68
This multi-disciplinary assemblage has in fact been instrumental in allowing the come-back of crafting and tinkering in art and design, via mostnotably the use of digital fabrication and rapid prototyping workshops,
most commonly branded under the name FabLab,69 as well as allowing
the co-habitation of concepts such user empowerment and entrepreneurship, which are both mixed under the so-called maker movement,70 but
also connect back to the seventies Do It Yourself (DIY) scene.71

68

In that sense, from the viewpoint of participatory design, free and open source software is not the ultimate form of collaboration, but one of many different types ofprocesses and procedures that can be deployed for designing things.
69
Julia Walter-Herrmann and Corinne Büching, FabLab: Of Machines, Makers and Inventors (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013).
70
Chris Anderson, Makers : The New Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown Business,2012).
71
This is particularly true for the countercultural dimension of DIY. For instance there
is an interesting connection between the “Free Furniture” design ideas from the 1971
Steal this Book work by American political and social activist Abbie Hoffman, andthe “free (as in freedom)” 2012 uH bench open source public bench by Belgian designer Julien Deswaef, developed in the context of “urban hacking” and the reclaiming of public space. While each of these approaches deal with the notion of freedom
differently, the overlap in methods and activist intention is striking and cannot bedismissed as coincidental. See Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (New York: Pirate Editions, 1971), 23–25. and see Julien Deswaef, “UH Bench - Open Source Public Bench,”
2012, http://xuv.be/uH-bench-open-source-public-bench.html.

100

As a consequence, open design ends up overlapping with all sorts ofsocial, autonomous, and commercial practices. Indeed, the principle ofdesigning and co-creating things that can be freely digitally distributedon online platforms and networks, then improved or modified by others,
and eventually made tangible by their quick making with hobbyist andsemi-industrial machinery, can give the idea that it can be applied for awide range of applications: its modularity and fast deployment is ideal
for strategic humanist projects and interventions; the making of uniquetools and technical methodologies close to the ethos of manual labour isrelevant for design practices in line with the Arts and Crafts movement
but also meaningful for designers in search of novel forms of production;and of course the idea of a network of small generic manufacturing units
has a bearing with businesses relying on prosumerism. It should nottake long to realise that to be able to articulate such differences and approaches, a whole new subset of terms, definitions and licenses will beneeded. While it is not within the scope of this thesis to look into this
aspect specifically, I will mention that it is very much like zooming intoa fractal set, because there is virtually no difference between the current
state of open design where there is no clear consensus about a specificdefinition, and the state of proto free culture some years ago when several visions co-existed. At the time of writing this text, open design isrepresented by an assortment of definitions, scopes, perspectives, and ofcourse several new licenses to implement these definitions,72 as well as

72

See Open Source Hardware Association, “Brief History of Open Source Hardware Organizations and Definitions,” 2013, http://www.oshwa.org/research/brief-history-of-open-source-hardware-organizations-and-definitions/.

101

taking into account the physical dimension of some of these designs.73
Practically speaking, nobody knows at this point, or known since its
infancy, if open design will in the end manage to converge towards ashared model of production, or if it will instead diverge into “a plethoraof different models that embrace various aspects of commons-based peer
production, with users switching between different models as appropriate.”74 Meanwhile, the main voices from the free and open source communities are not quite sure how to articulate their understanding of theserecent transformations. Even though Stallman would eventually reconsider75 his previous discouraging views76 on the validity of free hardware,
it seems that these questions are out of the FSF scope which tends so far
to limit itself to only recommending hardware that does not use one bitof non-free software with no concern about its means of production;77
similarly, the OSI does not review any licenses specific to open source
hardware design, making room in practice for the emergence and competition of new institutions and organisation more apt to deal with theissue.78 But if open design, as in the era of proto-free culture, is currently

73

Most notably, the notion of free and open source hardware has opened several cansof worms given the need to take more carefully into account the distinction between
copyright and patent laws. See Wade D. Peterson, “The Creation of Interoperable
Integrated Circuits Using Clean Room Design Practice,” research report (Silicore Corporation, 2008)
74
Peter Troxler, “Libraries of the Peer Production Era,” in Open Design Now, ed. Lucas
Evers Bas van Abel Roel Klaassen and Peter Troxler (Amsterdam: BIS publishers,2011).
75
Richard M. Stallman, “Why We Need Free Digital Hardware Designs,” Wired, 2015,
https://www.wired.com/2015/03/need-free-digital-hardware-designs/.
76
Richard M. Stallman, “On ‘Free Hardware’,” Linux Today, 1999, http://www.
linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/1999062200505NWLF.
77
Joshua Gay, “Respects Your Freedom Hardware Certification Requirements,” 2012,https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/criteria.
78
See Open Source Hardware Association, “Brief History of Open Source Hardware

102

showing some healthy signs of pluralism from the outside, it is not bydesign, but as with free culture, it is the result of the assumption that everyone is heading towards the same goal. Unfortunately in recent years
some cracks in the wall have started to appear, which highlight the limits
of unspoken consensual definitions in these groups. This is peculiarly
noticeable with 3D printing, which has became emblematic of the open
design versatility, and the ultimate mascot of the maker movement.

2.5

The Liberal Democratic Industries ofFreedom and Openness

3D printing is in fact modern alchemy. Of course, it does not focus on
the transmutation of common metals into gold. Instead, it deals with thetransmutation of digital information into tangible objects. An interesting aspect of this process is the transmutation of the alchemists themselves. This analogy is not innocent. Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung
used alchemy to exemplify the process of individuation of the alchemist,
a process of psychological development towards the Self.79 3D printing
operates similarly, and its impact goes well beyond the local productionof objects pulled from a recombining library of digital models. In fact,drawn into the symbolism of direct-digital manufacturing, big data, theInternet, and just-in-time practices, with 3D printing, open designers are

79

Organizations and Definitions.”
William McGuire, Gerhard Adler, Herbert Read and Michael Fordham, ed., Collected
Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 12: Psychology and Alchemy (1953; repr., Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2014).

103

being transmuted into the true replicable yet indefinitely customised Self:
the co-creating Tofflerian prosumer.80 With this remark, I make a connection with the individuation of the programmer and their relationshipwith source code as psychopomp, discussed in Chapter 1. On a more general view, French philosopher Bernard Stiegler also saw in free software
a process of individuation. For Stiegler, it is more particularly definedas the process that substitutes the duality of consumer/producer with an
infrastructure made of active contributors, and according to him this individuation permits the transformation and the questioning of the self, as
well as enabling the sharing and responsibility of what is made.81 While
I believe that the exact same principles of individuation can be applied
to open designers and 3D printing, in both cases it should not be treated
without its existentialist counterpart which is the question of authenticity
within open design. Said differently, what happens to this very individuation when it is faced with inconspicuous deceptive mechanisms?
When makers, fabbers, and open designers start to use 3D printers, thetechnology is not new.82 What is novel however is accessibility to thetechnology with simpler, cheaper components, and the recursive consequences of using GPL licensing for these: this is the story of the RepRap,
a machine that should eventually be able to print itself entirely. The consequences of such a, still theoretical, economical fork bomb are multiple,

80

In reference to Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (1980; repr., New York: Bantam Books,
1981).
81
Quentin Noirfalisse, “Le Logiciel Libre Peut Redonner Sens à Nos Vies,” Le Soir, 2011,18.
82
For a brief historical overview, see Chee Kai Chua and Kah Fai Leong, 3D Printing and
Additive Manufacturing : Principles and Applications (New Jersey: World Scientific,2015), 1.1 Development of AM.

104

but most importantly according to the RepRap project inventor, British
engineer and mathematician Adrian Bowyer, such a replicating manufacturing unit could “allow the world’s poorest people easily to put a footon the first rung of the manufacturing ladder that has made the rest of
us rich,”83 a comment that is symptomatic of the delusional enthusiasmthat often accompanies the arrival of a new technology.84 Even if in thefollowing years Bowyer would significantly tone down his moral and political motives—with the adoption of the pragmatic rationalism from theopen source narrative and by putting upfront the notion of evolutionary game theory as the common ground for those wishing to contributeto the project85 —the subtext of the project and its early introduction as
an apparatus that would bring down global capitalism,86 made it popular in circles where free culture could not be decoupled from social concerns,87 and those for who free and open source technologies, and theirlegal framework, are unconditionally linked to the shaping of a better
society.88
But of course, and linking back to the many roots of the open design

83

Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma : How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism(New York: Free Pres, 2008), 30.
84
Langdon Winner, “Sow’s Ears from Silk Purses: The Strange Alchemy of Technological Visionaries,” in Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears That Shape New Technologies, ed. Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).
85
Adrian Bowyer, “[Reprap-Dev-Policy] Reprap and Open Source,” 2011,https://web.archive.org/web/20121103025921/http://lists.reprap.org/pipermail/reprap-dev-policy/2011-February/000001.html.
86James Randerson, “Put Your Feet up, Santa, the Christmas Machine Has Arrived,” The
Guardian, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2006/nov/25/frontpagenews.
christmas2006.
87
As seen in a previous section.
88
See Paul Mason, Postcapitalism : A Guide to Our Future (New York: Farrar, Straus;
Giroux, 2015), Chapter 5, Chapter 10.

105

field, such an invention also resonated strongly for those who interpreted
openness as yet another tool for capitalist manoeuvres. Even though initially started by academic groups of users-developers, it soon moved toa mix of users from different backgrounds, as well as paid and unpaid
developers. The RepRap project also helped to create a distributed andnetworked assembly line of open source products sold by a few for-profit
companies. While the anti-global capitalist tone of the early days of the
project were facing the reality of sustainability for its most involved participants, it also became an open door for exploitative strategies that did
not give anything back to the RepRap community.
In particular this can be seen in the way a company such as MakerBot
Industries, used the community and the research on the RepRap project,
to develop and refine a series of products while accumulating experience and customer feedback in the process. As I will further develop
in Part 2 of the dissertation, from a licensing perspective there is absolutely nothing wrong in deriving a commercial product here, and in thatsense MakerBot Industries was no different from any other parts of thecommercial open source hardware ecosystem that had formed aroundthe RepRap. However in this case only the first product from this company was made open source. Starting in 2012, the following versions
were closed source. Alongside this, and despite their bad reputation infree and open source circles89 some patents were also filled by MakerBot
Industries90 who had coincidently received venture capital a few months

89

Luca Lucarini, Patent Absurdity: How Software Patents Broke the System, Film (Boston:Free Software Foundation, 2010).
90
For a lits of all patents from Makerbot Industries, 53 at time of writing, see Google106

before the release of their closed source product.91 The immediate result is not an economical fork bomb, but a violent blow to the community, with some of the smaller companies and freelancers deeply involved
with the idea of open source hardware describing “RepRap and especially
3D printing […] now full of bullshit.”92 The same sentiments came fromone of the three MakerBot Industries founders who was, according tohim, forced out around the time of this new product release, and who
described the “move to closed source as the ultimate betrayal” with thecompany adopting “a load of corporate double-speak bullshit.”93
Next to this, other wall fissures in the open design world appeared
during the rest of the year on the Thingiverse website, the leading online
platform owned by MakerBot Industries where open source hardware designs can be shared under GPL and CC licenses. Two incidents in particular are relevant, and both originate from changes in the terms of service(TOS) of the platform. While Thingiverse was initially relatively illustrative of the messy pluralistic nature of open design, where all sorts ofthings could be uploaded and licensed with an arbitrary collection of freeand non-free licenses, two decisions were made that would reduce thispluralism to a narrower subset aligned with the ethical and economical
concerns of the company running the site.

Inc., “Google Patents Search Results for Makerbot Industries,” 2017, https://patents.
google.com/?assignee=MakerBot+Industries&num=100.
91
Bre Pettis, “All-Star Lineup Invests in Makerbot,” 2011, https://www.makerbot.com/
media-center/2011/08/23/all-star-lineup-invests-in-makerbot.
92
Josef Průša, “Open Hardware Meaning,” 2012, \url{http://josefprusa.cz/openhardware-meaning/}.
93
Zachary Smith,“MakerBot Vs.
Open Source – a Founder
http://www.hoektronics.com/2012/09/21/
Perspective,”
2012,
makerbot-and-open-source-a-founder-perspective/.

107

The first decision was the purging of gun parts designs because thecompany’s “focus is to empower the creative process and make thingsfor good”. But this decision eventually led to the creation of the DEFCAD
project in 2012, an open source search engine for 3D models of all sorts
and purposes, without any restriction. The project initiated by American free-market anarchist and crypto-anarchist Cody Wilson, is part ofthe larger agenda of the Defense Distributed94 online organisation hefounded, and focussed on the development of 3D printed weapons accessible to anyone. This particular approach to openness which can be understood from the perspective of libertarianism, avoids the smokescreenof ethical debate and directly responds to disenchantment with politics.
It is made clear on the DEFCAD website with the following headlines theday of its launch: “Google can’t, MakerBot won’t, Politicians say don’t,
We the People, we will”.95
The second incident is not of ethical nature but has to do with the economic dimension of open design. So far in this thesis I have presented
licenses as documents that can be used by an intellectual property owner
to form novel ways of distribution and transformations while still, for themost part, relying on existing copyright laws. However, these documents
do not exclude each others. I will come back to the issue of dual-, triple-,and n-, licensing in the next chapters, but for now I will simply say thatthe copyright owner is free to apply, or agree to apply, any and all licenses

94

DefenseDistributed,“DEFCAD,”2012,
https://web.archive.org/web/20121224010445/http://defcad.org/.
95
Defense Distributed, “DEFCAD: Open-Source Search Engine for 3D Printing,” 2013,https://web.archive.org/web/20130403073010/http://www.defcad.com/.

108

if they like, and be free to agree on all sorts of non-exclusive licensing andagreements concerning their property. So an open source hardware design can be both licensed under the public domain friendly CC0 license,
and the non commercial non derivative CC BY-NC-ND, while being at thesame time the subject of a special commercial exploitation contract with athird-party. That would not make any sense at all,96 but it’s perfectly possible to do so. This contradiction can nevertheless be forced upon open
designers via the TOS of the platform they use to distribute their work,
which is what happened when Thingiverse introduced in its terms therequirement to give “to the Company and its affiliates and partners, anirrevocable, non exclusive, royalty-free and fully paid, worldwide license
to reproduce, distribute, publicly display and perform, prepare derivative
works of, incorporate into other works, and otherwise use [their] User
Content, and to grant sublicenses of the foregoing, solely for the purposesof including [their] User Content in the Site and Services,”97 and made its
contributors “irrevocably waive (and cause to be waived) any claims andassertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to [their] User Content.”98 The decision was followed by a virtual protest under the form of
an “Occupy Thingiverse” action in 2012, but this part of the TOS is stillunchanged at the time of writing. Even if this is perceived by the protestants as yet another betrayal of the community ethos, the terms work like96

I’m excluding here the potential trolling effect of such an approach to free culture
licensing.
97
MakerBot Industries, “Thingiverse Terms of Use,” 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20120312203852/http://www.thingiverse.com/legal.
98
Ibid.

109

a non-negotiable contract on top of the license,99 and is so pervasive that
it is nothing but a transfer of copyright in disguise.
Simulating pluralism via some unspoken or unclear consensus madearound terms that are loosely defined cannot be sustainable.100 Sooner
or later the balance will shift dramatically at the expense of others, surprised to be suddenly precipitated into an alien monoculture. Instead ofbeing able to develop strategies of adversarial politics, the pluralistic nature of open design, the maker movement and others, are increasingly
dominated by the aggregation of groups whose ideologies are compatible or overlapping, which in the present situation are essentially linked
to the roadmap of so-called smart industries and the next industrial revolution.101 Of course, things are not static, and such dominance can also99

For a more detailed analysis and other intellectual property issues related to Thingiverse, see Ramon Lobato Jarkko Moilanen Angela Daly and Darcy Allen., “Culturesof Sharing in 3D Printing: What Can We Learn from the Licence Choices of Thingiverse Users?” Journal of Peer Production 6 (2015), http://peerproduction.net/issues/
issue-6-disruption-and-the-law/peer-reviewed-articles/.
100
There should be no doubt that such stories are not exceptional. Open design is aminefield for the beginner and specialist alike, and things only get messier when
taking into account the international cultural diversity of hardware manufacturing.
This is visible, to give an example, in the clash between classic western IP models
and the Chinese shanzhai tradition, which in the context of hardware manufacturing, has enabled the creation of the tech mashup open BOM culture. The latter is anumbrella term to drescribe practices of sharing bills of materials and other designmaterials between Chinese small and mid-size manufacturers, and policed alone bycommunity word of mouth. This practice in particular has recently been given thename “gongkai” (公开) by US hacker Andrew Huang. See Andrew Huang, 2013,https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107; Huang, “Tech Trend.”; Mario
Wenning, “Shanzhai: Dekonstruktion Auf Chinesisch. by Byung-Chul Han (Review),” Philosophy East and West 64, no. 1 (2014).
101
See Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Incidentally, the 2015 careers page of MakerBot Industries’ website was opening up
with the large headline “JOIN THE NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION”, see MakerBot Industries, “Explore Career Opportunities,” 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150905052715/http://www.makerbot.com/careers.

110be overruled, but for this to happen the notion of common cannot be decoupled from the political. Because open design was never understood asa place of conflict, because it was not understood as a political struggle,
or was simply denied a political dimension, and was instead reduced to
its technological apparatus, its economics, or its ethics under an assumed
consensus, there could only be deception further down the road, and aninvalidation of the identity politics that emerged in the proto-free culture
era of the late nineties and early noughties.
Critical making102 and engineering103 are not enough, explicit politicalmaking is lacking in today’s free and open source practices. Regardlessof the morality of a project such as DEFCAD, it has been one, perhaps
the only one, concrete response to this particular process of subjugation,
because it triggered an hegemonic versus counter-hegemonic dynamic,
a public discussion about learning and reflecting outside of the technolegal niche of the professionals of free and open source production. What
I can see today is that without a strong political ground, the current stateof open design can be interpreted very pessimisticly with little hope forchange.104 Worse still, actors of its early connection to a wider culturalcontext—for instance with the attempt to consider the approach of Brazilian gambiarra as a counter to industrial born prototyping practices105 —102

Matt Ratto, “Critical Making,” in Open Design Now, ed. Bas van Abel, Roel Klaassen,
Lucas Evers and Peter Troxler (Amsterdam: BIS publishers, 2011).
103
Jussi Parikka, “Critically Engineered Wireless Politics,” Culture Machine 14 (2013).
104
Julia Rone, “Playing Hard: Open Source Hardware Production as a Game (Changer),”in Are You Being Served?, ed. Anne Laforet, Marloes de Valk, Madeleine Aktypi, An
Mertens, Femke Snelting, Michaela Lakova, and Reni Höffmuller (Brussels: Constant,2014).
105
Make art festival, Gabriel Menotti: Gambiarra and the Prototyping Perspective, lecture recording (Poitiers: GOTO10, 2010), https://archive.bleu255.com/makeart/2010/111

are now leaving a ship they believe is sinking. Instead of providing thenecessary counter-hegemonic communities, they seem to have lost theirenergy and grown increasingly cynical towards the makers movement
they first thought they were connected to,106 suggesting today the needto set-up an exodus towards other matters and concerns. But by doing
so, they are ultimately leaving the way free for the hegemonic practices
they fought so far.

106

?page=video&lang=en#makeart2010_-_2010-11-06_-_gabriel_menotti.ogg.
Fonseca, “Gambiarra.”

112

Part 2: Free as in… Art

113

In Part 1, Free as in… Culture, I wanted to question the archetypical free
software paradigm shift narrative, and the accompanying rhetoric of the
subcultural hero through which free software was described as a subversive response to some of the technical and commercial strategies usedby the computer industry in the nineties, or at the opposite end when
it is framed as the ultimate and most efficient method for any kind ofcooperative and collaborative forms of production. As I mentioned earlier, my position was not to undermine these particular properties, butinstead to make visible some aspects that I find much more important
than these specific perspectives. Notably, I have shown that the question of software freedom was not a creatio ex nihilo, but was completelyinterleaved with the history of computation and programming. Next tothat, being a by-product of prototyping, and solutionist engineering culture, free software never was, and is still not, a static thing. Its narrative,
discourse, and tools constantly change and adapt to their surroundings.
This is for instance visible in the way the collective identity of free software has been shaped in the nineties with the rise of Microsoft,1 then in
the noughties with the spread of digital rights management (DRM)2 andsoftware-as-a-service3 , and more recently with concerns about privacy
and transparency in the age of global surveillance.4

1
2
3
4

Williams, Free as in Freedom, 13–17, p. 98, p. 112.
Free Software Foundation, “About Defectivebydesign,” 2006, https://web.archive.org/
web/20060524230110/http://defectivebydesign.org/about.
Benjamin Jean, “‘Option Libre’: Compatibilité Entre Contrats” (Master’s thesis, Université Montpellier-I, 2006), 21–22.
Angela Watercutter, “Stallman: How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?” Wired, 2013, \url{https://www.wired.com/2013/10/a-necessary-evil-what-ittakes-for-democracy-to-survive-surveillance}.

114

I have explained that this malleability and constant re-contextualisation
could find its origin in source code itself, and more particularly its dual
literary openness, for machines and human beings. I have argued thatin particular the divergence in software interpretation is the reason
why the same source code file, published with the same license cancreate a wide range of conflicting positions which have historically
been oscillating between ethics and economics. I have also shown thatsuch re-contextualisation has been implemented at a techno-legal level,
through the development of definitions and licenses, and all together
have provided a template of sorts that greatly facilitated its cultural
diffusion and appropriation. As a result the emulation offered by thefree software definition and licensing has grown popular for all sorts ofideologies, because it offered a model in which different groups could
easily express their alienation, the disappearance of their community,
and allow for the reparation of a lost or the construction a new hegemonic order. What followed was the constitution of many imaginedcommunities which gathered around an assumed form of commonness.
As a result I have preferred to refer to the creation of these different
groups as virtual communities, language-games and emulations at theservice of a wide range of ideologies, rather than supporting the idea ofa global movement due to the lack of clean common interpretation ofcultural freedom.
This is why I have associated the idea of radical democracy with theprototypical free culture era of the late nineties and early noughties,
given the agonistic dimension of its pluralism, and why I have presented
the efforts to define free culture and the emergence of an organisation like115

CC as the decaying of such pluralism, more specifically under the formof coalitions around two modes of democratic discourse: respectively deliberative and aggregative. If I have no doubt that this process was agenuine initiative to make something more coherent and to consolidate
all these different communities, it cannot be detached from the fact thatby acting effectively as an hegemonic filter, it had nonetheless reduced
cultural freedom to a limited subset of its potentiality. I have shown inparticular that the denial of political dimension was particularly deceptive and had been the main reason why the consensual foundation ofthese different efforts was flawed. Finally, I have explained that withoutawareness or understanding that cultural freedom is also a place of political conflict and struggle, the different communities excluded from thedominant family of ideologies, will perceive this flawed consensus as aform of betrayal and abandon the different fields they have helped shape,
instead of responding to this revelation as an attack in the political realm
from their adversaries.
If in the first part of this thesis I have started to sketch a model inwhich free culture is fundamentally a template made available for others
to articulate their own practice and ideology, I still have to analyse howsuch a cultural appropriation is taking place. While doing this for all
the communities that have in the past claimed these methods would be arather intimidating task, I will instead focus on one type of appropriationof such ideas in the domain of artistic practices. This will be the main
subject of the next chapter and a particular attention will be given to thenotion of Art Libre and the Free Art License, one of the very few effort
from the proto free culture era that is still active at the time of writing.
116

The most revolutionary aspect of free software is in its constitutive
nature. By constitutive, I mean its ability to first originally fabricate andembellish a framework for Stallman’s ideas on communities and software
sharing, so these can survive the techno-legal changes he witnessed at the
MIT AI Lab, and second, beyond Stallman’s vision, to turn such a framework into a template avalaible for others so they can either emulate theirlost, reinforce existing, or bootstrap new practices. I have shown that
this second point relied essentially on the couple definition/license thatworked as a cyber constitution for the virtual community. Eventually
other groups and individuals started to appropriate this template to try toestablish their own virtual communities, and as the cultural diffusion ofthis template grew, the realm of non-software cultural expressions would
eventually be reached in the second half of the nineties, first in the formof proto-free culture, and later as part of the emergence of a free culture
movement. However, given the radical ideological differences present insuch development, I have argued that this process should be best understood as many different hegemonic and counter-hegemonic dynamics,
rather than as global movements, as the notions of freedom and openness
expressed by these different groups were at best slightly overlapping, butalso contradictory or opposed. In this second part, I will articulate thisargument in much more detail by looking in particular at the way artists
have appropriated this template, and test if this appropriation consolidates or weakens the concept of free culture.
To do so, I will, in Chapter 3, look at the history of Art Libre, free art. I
will detail how and why it existed as two different concurrent concepts,
and how they related to software freedom. The proto-free and free cul117

ture eras have notably demonstrated the adaptability of the free softwaremodel to become relevant for a broad range of ideological manifestations.
To be sure, the adaptability I am referring to is not that of the free software idea itself, but of its articulation. Thus in this section I will argue
that understanding free software as a template for community emulation,and not a broad social movement, is essential to see the reason why a very
wide range of incentives have been able to relate to the notion of software
freedom, albeit in its abstracted form.
In Chapter 4, The Practice of Free-range Free Culture I will discuss how
the artistic appropriation of the free software template can also happen
at the level of individual practices, and that there also exists a process ofcultural diffusion within the cultural appropriation of software freedom.
This is the reason why I am using the term free-range, and, based on several semi-structured interviews, I will argue that free cultural practices
and appropriations are echoed at several levels, motivated by rather diverse beliefs and intentions which are articulated far from the epicentresof the more official free culture, like the FSF or CC.
Finally, in the last chapter of this second part, Chapter 5, Free Cultural
Misunderstandings, I will examine how the individual experience and personal narration of free cultural practices, such as the ones described in
Chapter 4, creates a situation where nothing can be taken for granted
when it comes to interpretating the intentions behind such practices. If
this is indeed the strength of the techno-legal template derived from free
software and its couple definition/license, it also makes generalisation
and broad analysis of the free culture discourse impossible, as its univer-118

sality and commons is in fact constituated of many singular experiences,that are often incompatible and contradictory. To illustrate this, I will
discuss two points: first I will argue that copyleft sits at the cross-road
between the cultural field and the legal field, which creates both opportunities and misunderstandings for artists to link their practice with thefamous free software mechanism; and second, the difficulty of pinpointing precisely the connection between free and open source forms of licensing and their commercial exploitation, which has led in the past, andstill nowadays, to the creation of faulty generalisations in relation for
instance to work and capital.

119Chapter 3
Art Libre

3.1

Free Art Incentives

As explained in Chapter 1, while the late nineties brought to life some experiments on the creation of generalised proto-free culture licenses, thistransposition first went through a direct use of the GPL for non-software
creations, articulated most notably by Stutz in 1997.1 However, this transposition was not only noticed by digital practitioners, or for that matteranyone close to free and open source software circles. In fact, in the same
year of the publication of Stutz’s text, copyleft was mentioned by a law
scholar as a valid framework for collaborative artworks in which artists
would pass “each work from one artist to another.”2 That remark is par-1
2

Stutz, “/Doc/Comp/Gnu/.”
Heffan, “Copyleft,” 1448.

120

ticularly significant not because of the collaborative dimension applied
to art, but because of the explicit concern to provide a legal validity tocertain practices whose origins are buried in the depths of art history.
Indeed, the idea of works passing from one artist to another and thequestions of copies, derivative works, appropriation, or plagiarism, arenothing new.3 So, why a sudden interest in such practices at the turn of
this century?
The reason is simple and the culprits are not the methods used in artistic practices, but rather their practice within the digital realm. With thefast adoption of personal computers and the democratisation of the Internet throughout the nineties, this “convergence of media technologies
and of digital computing”4 eventually became known as new media, aterm made popular by Russian media theorist Lev Manovich,5 yet thenewness of which was in fact very much indebted to video and television.6 However, if the emergence of new media practices were instrumental in broadening computer related art practices, it also challenged
the intellectual property frameworks that were adjusted for older media
only. As French Philosopher Jacques Derrida noted in 1995, the rise ofelectronic media must necessarily be accompanied by juridical and political transformations,7 and from the perspective of copyright laws in

3
4
5
6
7

See Florian Cramer, “Anti-Copyright in Artistic Subcultures,” 2010, http://
anticopyright.pleintekst.nl/.
Lev Manovich, “New Media: A User’s Guide,” 1999, 14, http://manovich.net/index.
php/projects/new-media-a-user-s-guide.
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
Sheila C. Murphy, How Television Invented New Media (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive : Une Impression Freudienn (Paris: Galilée, 1995), 35.

121the age of an Internet becoming increasingly commercial, the GPL copyright hack provided an interesting model for lawyers, then urged to revise
their approach to intellectual property to accommodate different strands
of practices that will eventually be associated with new media. In particular, the notion of originality and creativity became confronted with thetools and techniques of file sharing and digital data processing, in a system where everything is a copy.8 For instance in the US, and under the
1976 US Copyright Act, the only recognised artistic collaborative work
was the joint work, in which different contributions were meant to be“merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole.”9
Said differently, the joint work assumed both the existence of an agreement to develop a final work, as well as a commonness of the intention
behind the creation of that work. This made perfect sense in the context
of the print-based copyright doctrine, but clearly does not work for digital environments where the romantic understanding of authorship waschallenged by the dense network of branches, copies, and processes inherent to software-driven networked collaboration, where files, texts, bits ofcode and whatever digital bytes could end up at any time as part of an
online assemblage or collage. Net art, with and without the dot, will be
particularly exemplary in showing the impact of the net on the difficultyof framing a particular discourse, a canon, a definition, a movement, or

8

9

See Lawrence Lessig, “(Re)creativity: How Creativity Lives,” in Copyright and Other
Fairy Tales: Hans Christian Andersen and the Commodification of Creativity, ed. Helle
Porsdam (Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2006).
94th Congress Public Law 94-553, “TITLE 17—COPYRIGHTS,” October 19, 1976, 101.
Definitions.

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simply establish a static viewpoint of such a dynamic environment.10
Intellectual property scholar Margaret Chon in her 1996 article New
Wine Bursting From Old Bottles, had already used the 1992 work ChainArt
by media artist Bonnie Mitchell, to demonstrate this particular limit of the
copyright doctrine.11 Mitchell’s pre-WWW project, which seems rather
trivial by today’s standards, was a chain in which her students and fellow artists were invited to modify a digital image, and pass it to someone
else via e-mail and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) servers.12 The work isinteresting because it makes extremely explicit the dichotomy between
digital media as a telecommunication carrier, and digital media as artistic material.13 But according to Mitchell, the whole system and its different iterations are the work itself, not just the final image at the end of
the chain.14 The work exists as a collection of derived, reused and, somewould more easily say today remixed, individual elements that could not
be flattened down into one single joint work, in a work of digital media
conflation. Being hard to pin down, Chon noted the legal consequenceof such chained media work in its impossible protection, and challenge toproperly credit, under the limited copyright rules.15
Following the juridical literature, the work was then picked up by in-

10

See Josephine Bosma, Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2011).
Margaret Chon, “New Wine Bursting from Old Bottles: Collaborative Internet Art,
Joint Works, and Enterpreneurship,” Oregon Law Review 75, no. 1 (1996): 257–76.
12Bonnie Mitchell, “Creative Connections: International Networked Collaborative Art.
Unpublished Paper Presented to the College Art Association 83rd Annual Conference,” 1995.
13
For a discussion about this particular distinction, see Florian Cramer, Anti-Media:
Ephemera on Speculative Arts (Rotterdam: Nai010 Publishers, 2013), 12–14.
14
Chon, “New Wine Bursting from Old Bottles.”
15
Ibid.

11

123

tellectual property attorney Ira V. Heffan in 1997, who used it as an ideal
example of artistic works that could greatly benefit from both the GPL,and the creative use of its copyleft mechanism that would encourage “thecreation of collaborative works by strangers.”16 Although Heffan’s conclusion is legally sound, and basically provides, unknowingly it seems,
an academic echo to Stutz’s own conclusion and generalisation regarding the GPL and non-software works published the same year,17 it does
nevertheless miss an important point, which is the cultural dimensionof such networked practices. Said differently, and as net art would illustrate further, what is not taken into account is the artistic desire to reflect
upon the nature of information in the age of computer networks. Even
if it seems to conveniently fill a legal gap, using the GPL for art practices
cannot be reduced to a mere desire to collaborate for the sake of collaborating, and to make a collage for the sole intent of glueing things together,out of its own consideration. This cultural aspect emerged from the early
debates about control and freedom of information and speech, as the Internet started to spread to more households throughout the mid- and latenineties.18 Artists did not wait for the approval of lawyers to claim theGPL, they used it for specific purposes unrelated to the need to make theirwork legally reasoned for the net. If there had already been discussions—most notably in the context of hypertextual literature—on the need for
new copyright models, like Ted Nelson’s idea of context and credit pre-16

Heffan, “Copyleft,” 1513.
See Chapter 2.
18
Moschovitis, History of the Internet, Chapter 7: Living on Internet time: 1995-1998.
17124

serving automated transcopyright system,19 the adaptability of new media practices–for instance with the mix of code and writing found inwhat American artist Alan Sondheim described as codeworks20 —allowed
artists to reflect as much in the production of media as in its distribution
in regard to intellectual property. Eventually alternative copyright disclaimers found their way into these works, such as the permissive copy
statement found in the file header of the 2002 code poetry london.pl by
British artist Graham Harwood,21 but moreso in the use of the GPL in
the 2003 software art pngreader by textz.com and Project GNUtenberg.22
So in fact, many artists adopted the GPL—and other free and open source
software licenses—early on to augment their work with a statement, bothderived and appropriated from the free software template, but adapted tothese new practices and intents. To be sure, at a time where there were
no Creative Commons licenses, no free culture definition, at the dawnof peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, and with intellectual property frameworks which were unable to apprehend the fast expansion of net culture,
the last thing artists looking at the GPL were interested in was the question of collaborative or cooperative infrastructures. These were alreadyin place and in use. What mattered instead was the paratextual abilityof free software licensing to colour a work as a strategy to criticise, com-

19

Theodor Holm Nelson, “Transcopyright: Pre-Permission for Virtual Republishing,”
Educom Review 32, no. 1 (1997): 32–35.
20
Alan Sondheim, “Introduction: Codework,” ABR 22, no. 6 (2001).
21
William Blake (Graham Harwood), “London.pl - Perl Routines to Manipulate London,” 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/20031204231930/http://www.scotoma.org/
lungs/london.txt.
22
Sebastian Lütgert, “pngreader: textz.com / Project GNUtenberg,” 2003, http://runme.
org/project/+pngreader/.

125ment, communicate a motivation for their practice, essentially creating“a proxy for, or even generative of, the artwork’s very substance”:23 in anutshell an artist’s statement in the age of new media and codeworks.
Most notably in 2000, Mirko Vidovic used the free software definition
to create the GNUArt project,24 a call to develop what he refers to as
free art,25 an effort to ensure the independence and freedom of artists,
liberated from the control of existing collecting societies, producers, andpublishers, while at the same time allowing them to interface with an audience and suggest new ways to deal with the sustainability of their practice in an independent way.26 The project uses the free software model
as a way of putting forward the notion of a work protected from external and exclusive control, a work which, according to the GNUArt author,
would then be free to circulate and evolve.27 By consciously choosing the
GPL as a means of creation and distribution, the different artists who contributed to GNUArt voluntarily engaged with the issue of commodity andculture. They used the free software template to implement an apparatus
that was not specific to software freedom, but specific to artistic freedom
mixed with social and political concerns.28 Such efforts were very muchconnected with a growing trend in the late nineties for media activism in

23

Natalie Adamson and Linda Goddard, “Artists’s Statements: Origins, Intentions, Exegis,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 48, no. 4 (2012): 363.
24
Mirko Vidovic, “GNUArt,” 2000, http://gnuart.org.
25
Not to be mistaken with the GNU Art section of the FSF website that is a collectionof logos, marks and artworks to be used as graphical assets for the visual identity of
the GNU project.
26“Du L’art Pas Du Cochon,” Les Puces Informatiques 30 (2000).
27
Vidovic, “GNUArt.”
28
Professor, dj wesh, and élody, “Sono Mutante,” 2003, http://3boom.net/sonomutante/.

126the arts, in particular in the scene of tactical media.29 Once again, thesepractices came into existence because of new media, because of this Internet thing, which ultimately permitted art practices to escape from their
historically constructed autonomy. To illustrate this, German critic Florian Cramer notably compares the difference between the “simulation of
corporate entities”30 within the safety and artificiality of the art system,
using as an example Res Ingold’s Ingold Airlines,31 to the same strategy
deployed over the Internet by The Yes Men, leading to their intervention
and spoof as spokespeople for the World Trade Organization (WTO) in1999.32 This is not an isolated event, and what codeworks, new media art,
net art, and other nineties networked media practices will demonstrateis the potential to liberate artistic critique, from decades of white cube
taming and commercial domestication.
This is why a system like GNUArt can also be understood as “a process of copying that offers dominant culture minimal material for recuperation by recycling the same images, actions, and sounds into radical
discourse,”33 to apply to this project the words from performance art andtactical media collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). In this context, another interpretation of free software licensing and art suddenly emerges:

29

Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance : Explorations in Tactical Media (New York:
Autonomedia, 2001).
30
Florian Cramer, “The Creative Common Misunderstanding,” in FLOSS+Art, ed.
Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk (Poitiers: GOTO10, 2008), 131.
31
Media Art Net, “Res Ingold ‘Ingold Airlines’,” 2005, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/ingold-airlines/.
32
Dan Ollman, Sarah Price and Chris Smith, The Yes Men, Film (Beverly Hills: United
Artists, 2003).
33
Critical Art Ensemble, “Recombinant Theatre and Digital Resistance,” The Drama Review 44, no. 4 (2000): 152.

127

the GPL is not just a tool to make juridically well-grounded endless digital
media transformation, it can be a materialist and performative flagshipfor recombining dreams of the digital resistance, close to that envisionedby the CAE collective, and shared by other groups at the time. Here, I
am not musing about, or conveniently interpreting a project like GNUArt
as an act of resistance. As with with Stallman’s lost community and theSymbolics episode, it is important to look at the human dimension ofthese projects, the anecdotes and footnotes inside the official stories. In
the case of GNUArt, bearing the same name, Vidovic’s father Mirko Vidović, is a Croatian writer who was associated with the Movement of Independent Intellectuals in Yugoslavia, opposing Tito’s regime in a quest
for freedom of speech. Despite having easily obtained his French nationality by marriage in 1962, and exiled to France so as to pursue his literarywork and studies, he is arrested in the late sixties during a visit to hisbirthplace in Western Bosnia. There, he will be tried and imprisoned forthe earlier publication of his book of poetry. Two years later, his sentence
is extended with his refusal to testify against members of the Croatian
Spring, a Yugoslavian political movement in favour of democratic andeconomic reforms. In total, Vidović will spend more than five years in
the Yugoslav Gulag camps, before his release and return to France toward
the end of the seventies.34 With such a lineage, it is easy to perceive a particular sensibility towards any forms of legal restriction, a sensibility that34

See Mirko Vidović, “The Movement of Independent Intellectuals in Yugoslavia,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2012.

128

would be eventually embodied in the GNUArt project itself.35
Even though GNUArt emerged outside of the new media art and tactical media scene, there is a clear extension into the digital domain of an
ambition to make art engage with intellectual and cultural resistance. It is
not just about making gigantic chains or collages or networked cadavres
exquis. Especially here, it is both rooted in a discourse of libertarian freespeech which opposes authoritarian entities, and the pragmatic desire
to develop an autonomous and empowering practice, in which its participants can build upon each other’s ideas and techniques by combining andcooperating within a common pool, a library, once again, of projects andmaterials, be it software or art. This project is a crucial step to understanding the different paths of evolutionary transitions in the development of
free culture. It is indeed not just the first and yet most articulate transposition of the FSF engineering freedom directed towards a politicallydriven artistic freedom by the means of licensing, it is also a demonstration of the capability of the free software template to be adapted andappropriated by others, so they can also set up their own Gemeinschaft
emulation. Every other effort during the proto-free culture era should
be understood similarly, and not simply as a direct transposition of thefree software discourse. As a matter of fact, in the last section of thischapter I will discuss Stallman’s struggle to understand the connections
made in the case of free art. But before this, I will first come back to thesecond part of the free art genesis, which is also very illustrative of the

35

Even if paradoxically the use of the GPL in art will also set in motion other forms ofequally restricting and disciplinary legal structures, as I will explain in Part 3.

129

apparently endless adaptability of the free software template.

3.2

Licence Art Libre

While Vidovic was the first to articulate the term art libre,36 and writing about the need for a Free Art License as early as 1998,37 we haveto wait until the year 2000 for the work of a few lawyers and artists,
namely Mélanie Clément-Fontaine, David Geraud, Isabelle Vodjdani, andAntoine Moreau, as well as the feedback from the participants of a freeart centred mailing list, to see the creation of such a Licence Art Libre38(LAL), also commonly referred to as the Free Art License as I stated earlier
in the introduction to the second part of this dissertation. The resulting
document is made to be an artistic equal to the GPL, yet articulated specifically for the creation of free art under the French jurisdiction, making
the FAL explicitly tailored for the French equivalent of copyright laws: ledroit d’auteur. This localism is however not an issue, indeed it is important to understand that the 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of
Literary and Artistic Works, give to the FAL an international scope, byassuring the respect and protection of the licensed work in all the states
involved in the agreement.39 This is not specific to the FAL: the GPL,
written within US copyright laws, also benefits from this international

36

Mirko Vidovic, “Art Libre,” 1998, http://www.mygale.org/~mirko/artlibre.html (notavailable anymore, including Wayback Machine, on file with author).
37
Mirko Vidovic, “Free Art Licence,” 1998, http://www.mygale.org/~mirko/freeart.html(not available anymore, including Wayback Machine, on file with author).
38
Copyleft Attitude, “License Art Libre 1.0,” 2000.
39
168 at the time of this writing.

130

copyright treaty, which explains why its popularity extended beyond US
jurisdiction. And the same can be said for any copyright based licenses
developped within the jurisdiction of any the Berne Convention signatories. That said, building a license under a different juridical medium,as with code, enables different specificities and interpretations, and as
for the notion of copyleft, it becomes in this particular context la gauched’auteur, so as to emphasize in a playful way the leftist tone of the project.
Alongside this, it’s probably with this project that the license reinforces its role as an artist’s statement the most. In the FAL, the copyleft principle is described as “la liberté contre le libéralisme,”40 freedom
against liberalism. This is an important matter, because while both the
GNUArt free art licensing and the FAL free art licensing work as artistic
statements, they do differ greatly in their intention. As a matter of fact,
Vidovic and Moreau did correspond by email during the early days of thecreation of the FAL, regarding the merging of their distinct efforts; but,just like with the OKD and freedom defined, despite the apparent overlap in scope this merging never occured due to diverging opinions andlack of interest to federate both projects.41 Indeed, if there is a connection between Vidovic’s free art and a type of cyber-libertarianism thatcan manifest itself in both left-wing and right-wing politics, as well as arelation with the fundamental notion of artistic freedom in the constitutions of some European countries,42 the lineage of free art as enabled by40

Antoine Moreau, “Artlibre.org,” 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20010223164739/
http://artlibre.org/.
41
This exchange was confirmed to me by both Vidovic and Moreau.
42
In particular Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

131the FAL is however of a different nature. In particular when the FAL, as
I said earlier, is announced by its authors as freedom against liberalism,it must be understood from the viewpoint of French left-wing politics
where liberalism is used broadly, to refer to capitalist systems and various strands of economic liberalism, including neoliberalism as well asclassic liberalism.
To be sure, in this context, free art appeared as yet another iterationin an ongoing, but more traditional, struggle to articulate the positionof the artist and their work within the art market and the cultural institutions that control it. It is very interesting to see for example thatthe term art libre appeared in France during the eighteenth century artisanat as a workaround to defend the circulation of designs outside of
the market control ruled by guilds,43 therefore trying to both escape andbenefit from the Renaissance split between craft and art. But it is evenmore striking that the concept of artistes libres was used to describe specific modes of art production, as part of a broader analysis in the cultural transformation in France, regarding the structuring of its artistic
field at the end of the nineteenth century. According to French art historian Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, under the French Third Republic, it isthus possible to make a distinction between three distinct structures of art
production: academic art, official art, and free art, art libre, the latter being represented in her research with the painters Odilon Redon and Paul

43

Lesley Ellis Miller, “Innovation and Industrial Espionage in Eighteenth-Century
France: An Investigation of the Selling of Silks Through Samples,” Journal of Design
History 12, no. 3 (1999): 279–80.

132

Cézanne.44 For Genet-Delacroix, free art is used as a term to show thatthe works of such artists were free from the official and academic institutions of the time, not from the market.45 She however notes that at thesame time these artists, who were largely ignored or disregarded by theauthoritative circuits of exhibitions and awards at the time, were able toreverse the terms of the dominant art market by substituting economics
with friendship, knowledge, and passion for art, precisely because they
were free from institutional constraints.46
So when Moreau writes that free art is freedom against liberalism, it
must be understood from the perspective of artists resisting the dynamics of the contemporary art market, and the creation of the FAL belongs
to a prolonged inner artistic dialogue about what defines the object ofart, its economics, and its values. In a way, as an artistic response, free
art is similar in its function to conceptualism, at least in the early daysof the latter, before some of its manifestations became commodified bygallery dealers in the mid seventies, given the commercial value of works
presenting both formal novelty and radical pretension.47 This is why infree art, the constraint of the license becomes a means of liberation of theartwork and the artist’s practice, from any possible future appropriations
other than those permitted by the license. For the artists involved in the
project this is not an art movement or genre, it is an attitude, thereby

44

Marie-Claude Genet-Delacroix, “Vies d’artistes: Art Académique, Art Officiel et Art
Libre En France a La Fin Du Xixe Siècle,” Revue d’histoire Moderne et Contemporaine(1954-) 33, no. 1 (1986): 41.
45
Ibid., 42.
46
Ibid., 60.
47
Brandon Taylor, Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now (New York: H.N.
Abrams, 1995), 34.

133

giving the name Copyleft Attitude to the artists meetings from which the
FAL came. With their license, rules stand on their own and provide aframework for a creative process that is meant to inspire a collectivist
approach to producing works, thus encouraging an artistic alternative tothe gallery and contemporary art market diktat on artwork production
and distribution. So even stronger than a statement, the FAL is a rationalised, functional, and official divorce letter from the artists, to the contemporary art world of curators, gallerists, and collectors after centuries
of proto-art libre infidelity.
Another important aspect of this latest iteration of free art is also theconstraint generated by the license. Having inherited the “playful cleverness”48 of the copyright hack, the FAL became both an artistic critiqueand a system to make art. In this respect, its practice boils down to a newvariation of the constraint system used by groups such as the Ouvroir
de littérature potentielle (OuLiPo), a sixties-born group of writers andmathematicians focussed on the creation of literary structures, in which
systems of constraints are used to promote and inspire creation.49 The
group dynamic itself is driven by rules, and in the same way that Cent
mille milliards de poèmes50 was the emblematic 1961 OuLiPo call and manifestation of creative rules to encourage a practice of constraint-based
writing, the launch of the FAL is similarly a call for legally-constrained48

Stallman, Free Software, Free Society, 17.
Such rules are either novel, and developed within the group, or themselves belong toa much broader cultural context and history. This is the case of the lipogram writing,where one or several specific letters are obviated. See Georges Perec, “History of the
Lipogram,” in Oulipo: A Primer or Potential Literature, ed. Warren F. Motte (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
50
Raymond Queneau, Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961).
49

134

art, and set the rules for the Copyleft Attitude community that will subsequently use the license to produce new works and recombine others
as part of a collective effort (Figure 3.1). But here the collective practiceis centrally dictated, and unlike GNUArt that aimed to spread and test
early on the idea of a boundless free art practice, which subsequently
might lead to a bottom-up emergence of decentralised collectives and cooperation, the FAL works differently as an artistic top-down gift to otherartists, to invite them to engage and participate in this game.51
Finally, given the cultural context in which the document emerged,
and despite the fact that—as I said in the previous chapter—a license is
not a contract, it is difficult not to frame the FAL within broader artistic
practices that use the contract as a means of institutional critique. From
Marcel Duchamp’s 1924 Monte Carlo Bond and the 1971 work The Artist’sContract by art dealer and curator Seth Siegelaub, to some of the more
recent works from artists Carey Young, Jill Magid, or the collective Superflex, to name a very few, artists have a long history of using the contractof aesthetics and the aesthetics of the contract in order to playfully destabilize institutional order and rationality.52 So in that sense, I find it very
hard to not link free art to such forms of artistic critique, where intellectual property is turned inside out to reveal other legal and ontologicalnarratives. However, even though Moreau notes that it is conceptually51

For an analysis of some examples of communication within the group, and the relationship with the works created and appropriated, how they relate, inform and influence each others, see Charlotte Bruge, “Art Libre : Un Enchevêtrement de Réseaux
Discursifs et Créatifs ?” (DEA Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication,
Université Charles de Gaulle, Lille 3, Lettres, Arts et Sciences Humaines, 2003).
52
See Daniel McClean, “The Artist’s Contract / from the Contract of Aesthetics to the
Aesthetics of the Contract,” Mousse Magazine, 2011.

135

Figure 3.1: Reuse and appropriation between FAL/LAL artists

Diagram: Charlotte Bruge, 2003

136

possible to attribute an artistic nature to the FAL, just as it is according
to him possible to do so for any other things, he insists that it is above alla legal document like any others. For him, the fact that it was produced
by artists and relates to the art domain, could indeed provide an artistic
element to the work, yet it was not their intention, and in fact a particularattention was given to make sure the Free Art License was created to be
a common useful tool.53

3.3

Usefulness of Legal Constraints as SafeHaven

To sum-up what I have discussed so far, the FAL works both as a system to make free art within the Copyleft Attitude group, in a way that ismeant to be useful and playful, and also as a means to generate an artistic
critique of contemporary art practices and economics. In that sense it exists as a coherent system, that just like free software, allows a community
to materialise its ideals and support their matching social structure andpractices. But beyond its critical and constituent usefulness, its artistic
usefulness remains unexplained.
As I have argued in the previous section, there is a link between freeart and constraint art systems such as the works of OuLiPo. However,I do not want this connection to be superficially understood from the53

See Moreau, “Le Copyleft Appliqué à La Création Hors Logiciel. Une Reformulation
Des Données Culturelles ?”137

perspective of the trivial playfulness in creating rules to collaborate on
a potentially never ending networked canvas. As I said earlier, this typeof functional usefulness was not an artistic motivation to start with, but
was a specific juridical speculation made by law scholars regarding thepotential of using the GPL for digital artworks. French poet RaymondQueneau, co-founder of OuLiPo had already advised in his 1938 essay
Qu’est-ce que l’art? 54 that artists should not stop at the proper executionof rules for art’s sake, and such a position could also be traced back to his
generational connection with movements such as Dada and surrealism,that saw le jeu as “a code word for rebellion,”55 and also predates the ludic
frameworks of the Situationist International.56 Said differently, there isand there must be something else expressed within these artistic games:

To simply perform one’s task well is to reduce art to a game, thenovel to a chess match, the poem to a puzzle. It’s not enough to say,nor to say well; the thing must be worth saying. But what is worth
saying? There’s no getting around it: that which is useful.57

So what is the artistic usefulness of free art? To understand this, it isfirst necessary to take into consideration the notion of liberation as foundin free software discourse. For example, it is common that free software
supporters use the term liberation when they aim at freeing a software

54

Raymond Queneau, Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays, 1928-70 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2007), 36.
55Constantin Toloudis, “The Impulse for the Ludic in the Poetics of Raymond Queneau,”
Twentieth Century Literature 35, no. 2 (1989): 149.
56
Les Sections de l’Internationale Situationniste, “Manifeste,” Internationale Situationniste 4 (1960): 36–38.
57
Queneau, Letters, Numbers, Forms, 36.

138

from its original intellectual property framework.58 Such an analogy can
get particularly mucky specially when Stallman himself uses the registerof the French Revolution to articulate various free software arguments,from using stereotypically the motto “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”59 tonaming a specific license clause as “Liberty or Death,”60 another social
revolution related wording that bares a strong link with The Terror, theviolent post-revolutionary period in France at the end of the eighteenth
century.61 This is not entirely specific to Stallman though, I have alreadyshown in the first chapter how the UNIX community had appropriatedthe New Hampshire motto, “LIVE FREE OR DIE - UNIX”.62
But in fact software is hardly ever liberated, because its source code istightly locked and hidden away both legally and technologically. Mostof the time the process of liberation is instead a complete reconstruction
from scratch of closed source and proprietary software. In the same waythat GNU is not a liberated UNIX but in reality a free software Unixlike operating system, a software such as the GNU Image Manipulation
Program (GIMP) is not a liberated Photoshop, but a free software rastergraphics editor.63 English critical theorist Matthew Fuller even argued

58

Bradley M. Kuhn, “From the Executive Director,” FSF Bulletin 1 (2002).
Free Software Foundation, “French Motto Button,” 2014, https://www.gnu.org/
graphics/french-motto.html; Richard M. Stallman, “Discours de Stallman à Linuxexpo Paris, 2002,” n.d., https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/2002-linuxexpo-paris.html.
60
Stallman, Free Software, Free Society, 160.
61
Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror : Liberty or Death in the French Revolution(Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2012), The Emotions in the demand for Terror.
62
See Chapter 1, Section 4.
63
All that said, it does not mean that such liberations are without risk. If these software re-creations build upon the principle that copyright only protects a particular implementation and not an idea, the ideas behind copyrighted implementations
can be patented. To be more explicit, the role of a software patent application is
to articulate the software invention in the form of pseudo-code, flowcharts, or al59

139that as a result, such forms of liberation are free yet not related to freethought given their submissive relationship with standards set by others.64 Here again the territoriality implied by the division between theGemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is visible: software freedom is first a framework to write free software in a different realm to the one in which it may
find its inspiration. However if anyone is free to use the free software
template to write free software, the usefulness of the latter, and therefore
whether or not it can be part of the GNU project, is left to be judged solely
by Stallman.65 Here, utility is not relative to the value of the software for
its user or author,66 but it is on the contrary relative to the software environment itself, that is to say the common and functional components,
such as the GUI, the kernel, the text editor, the shell, the C library, etc,67
so as to provide a “coherent” operating system.68 However this definition quickly reaches the problem of a lack of definition for these commonness and coherent functionalities, allowing software usefulness to besomething very arbitratry. In the end, it is possible to classify free soft-

gorithm descriptions. After that, and regardless of the programming language used,
the author of a software that would provide a feature already patented would need tohave the authorisation of the patent holder to distribute their software. For instancein 2006, Peter Kirchgessner was forced to stop distributing his GIMP image mosaic
plug-in because he had received cease and desist request from a patent holder who
argued the plug-in was infringing his patent rights, See Peter Kirchgessner, “UntitledPage,” 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20060721065830/http://www.kirchgessner.
net/photo-mosaic.html. For more information on software patents and free software,see Lucarini, Patent Absurdity.
64
Fuller, Behind the Blip, 25.
65
Free Software Foundation, “GNU Software Evaluation,” 2017, https://www.gnu.org/
help/evaluation.html.
66
Where usefulness depends on the context, see Knuth, Literate Programming, Computer programming as an art.
67
Stallman, Free Software, Free Society, 10.
68Free Software Foundation, “GNU Software Evaluation.”140

ware in three categories: first, GNU software, that is “useful programs”
approved by Stallman to be part of GNU,69 and for which copyright may
be transferred to the FSF if the authors want the organisation to enforce
the GPL for them; second, regular “useful free software,”70 that is free
software submitted to the Free Software Directory (FSD) and “reviewed
and approved and published by administrators”71 of the directory but notpart of GNU; third, everything else released under a free software license
and which I would call in the wild free software, or maybe even free free
software, given their existence outside of the FSF walled garden or forwhich the FSD seal of approval was denied.
It is astonishing that such a hierarchy presents a similar structure tothat I described earlier with the classification of art during the French
Third Republic, namely academic art, official art, and free art. It shows
again that as I argued in the previous chapter, the most interesting property of free software is its ability to recursively appropriate the structures
it criticises, and provide a template model for others to do the same. So
it is not surprising that free art also works similarly on three nested levels: first, free art produced as interactions between the members of the
Copyleft Attitude group;72 second, any free art that has been submitted
to the free art directory “Liste des Oeuvres,”73 and moderated by Copyleft

69

Ibid.
Contributors to the Free Software Directory Wiki, “The Free Software Directory,”
2017, https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Main_Page.
71
Contributors to the Free Software Directory Wiki, “Form:Entry,” 2016, https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Form:Entry.
72
Bruge, “Art Libre,” A.3 Le Réseau Créatif.
73
More precisely the website http://oeuvres.artlibre.org that has been active between
2005 and 2014.
70

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Attitude members; and third, every other works released under the FAL
and that I would also call in the wild free art or free free art. However, if
at first this seems to be a direct mapping of free software ontology onto
free art, it is rather yet another proof that when the free software template is appropriated, this process becomes an opportunity to make thismodel work for other ideological manifestations. So, in the case of free
art the functional usefulness is not used as a criteria to categorise theworks created. It is replaced instead by questions of morals and ethics
as a means, according to Moreau, of gaining freedom from and keeping
at a distance a libertarian conception of freedom.74 Said differently, anyone is free to create new or engage with existing free art works at anyof these three levels, yet their acceptance and visibility within the groupwill not be based on their usefulness—that could be understood here as
either the value they represent in terms of contributing to a coherent
body of work, or as the ability of the work to interface with or be usedwith others—but instead whether or not they match the aesthetics andidelogical perspectives of those who have initiated the FAL.
However, that does not mean that there is no functional usefulness
in free art, but the latter exists at a higher level. Indeed, the usefulness
resides in its ability to liberate art from artistic criteria,75 to emphasize“surrartistiques”76 practices, that is to say practices that do not have any
a priori notion of what art can be.77 So unlike anti-art which recognises

74

Email to author, November 13th, 2015.
Moreau, “Le Copyleft Appliqué à La Création Hors Logiciel. Une Reformulation Des
Données Culturelles ?” 549.
76
Ibid., 554.
77
Ibid., 554.
75

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its existence as within the boundaries of art with which it establishes a
dialogue,78 free art aims to settle elsewhere, in a way that is neither supraartistic, nor autonomist.79 Thus the usefulness of free art is in its ability
to create a space for such surrartistiques practices.
The logical next question is why these practices would need to be protected in such a way. When it comes to the place held by artistic practices
within culture, Moreau points that “[l]’art est à la culture ce que l’interdit est aux dits.”80 So while avoiding establishing a strict hierarchy withinculture, he nonetheless considers art as a particular expression, by arguing that the latter is to culture what the inter-said is to what is said. Here,he is referring to a concept from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan81
which addresses the discontinuity of the signifier. Lacan used the term
discontinuity to describe the existence of in-between spaces, as well as
the holes in the structure of language, that give clues to the presenceof hidden truths, as well as their forbidden characteristics by making awordplay with the French adjective interdit. Thus according to Moreau,
art is working in a similar manner with culture, with the former helping
to perceive the underlying structures of the latter. But it is also, almost ina psychoanalytical sense, a staging moment, an impulse of avant-garde
nature that eventually radiates throughout other cultural fields.

78

Cramer, Anti-Media, 24.
Moreau, “Le Copyleft Appliqué à La Création Hors Logiciel. Une Reformulation Des
Données Culturelles ?” 553.
80
Antoine Moreau, “L’Art est à la Culture ce que l’Inter-dit est aux Dits,” Loisirs Éducation, 2002.
81
See Jacques Lacan, “Subversion Du Sujet et Dialectique Du Désir Dans L’inconscientFreudien, ‘Lituraterre’,” in Lectures de Lacan, ed. Christian Fierens (Fernelmont:
E.M.E, 2010), 793–827.
79

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This distinction is essential to understand the conflictual relationship between art and culture, and appreciate its necessary martial
game. This allows to better grasp that the exploration of limits, thatis peculiar to art, sets into motion the cultural edifice at the risk ofcollapsing it. Also, it seems to me that the artistic practices thatmust inscribe themselves in the limited frame of culture cannot be
subject to any cultural policymaking. The breach that the budding
artist will create in the cultural field must be accepted and appreciated. Except a grain falls into the ground and dies, it is a whole harvest that becomes sterile. The young artist is a grower who denies
productivist and positive culture. Far from being nihilist, they are
the critical and constructive telling of what makes culture alive.82

For Moreau, the dynamics of the contemporary art market and the institutions that support it are a threat to a culture that is alive, and in his
analysis this very life depends on the ability of the artist to constantly
challenge and renew its foundation. This is why the idea of art that escapes art criteria is important in the free art discourse, because thesecriteria are understood as imposed rules that will dictate the art practice,which in this case would contribute to the failure of cultural renewal. In
the above quote in particular, he plays with the notion of field theory,la théorie des champs, by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,83 in orderto make an analogy between the sterile harvest of a field from which the82

My translation. Original text: “La distinction est indispensable pour comprendre lerapport conflictuel qui existe entre l’art et la culture et en apprécier le nécessaire
jeu martial. Cela permet de mieux saisir que l’exploration des limites propre à l’art
met en branle, au risque de l’écroulement, l’édifice culturel. Aussi, il me semble queles pratiques artistiques qui doivent s’inscrirent dans le cadre borné de la culture nepeuvent faire l’objet d’une politique culturelle. Qu’il faut accepter et apprécier lafaille que l’artiste en herbe va créer dans le champ culturel. Car si le grain ne meurt,
c’est toute une récolte qui devient stérile. Le jeune artiste est un cultivateur qui nie
la culture productiviste et positive. Loin d’être nihiliste, il est le révélateur critiqueet constructif de ce qui fait la culture vivante” Moreau, “L’Art est à la Culture ce quel’Inter-dit est aux Dits.”.
83
Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, “La Logique Des Champs,” in Réponses :Pour Une Anthropologie Réflexive, ed. Loïc J. D. Wacquant (Paris: Seuil, 1992).

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exploratory practice of the youthful cultivator is denied, with the becoming of a productivist cultural field that cannot perceive the fundamentalrole of the artist, and the usefulness of the cracks, pits, and various disruptions created in the process. Because this role is sensed as threatened,
the FAL exists to secure and enforce this space in-between, so as to makeroom, and to create protective and nurturing pockets of artistic freedom
in the interstices of a fabric woven by the politics of the culture industry.
If the FAL is indeed a useful tool, for Copyleft Attitude it is not a toolfor useful productivity, that is to say an efficient and productivist cooperation, as seen with the engineering and prototyping cultural propertiesof the GPL and the focus on promoting useful programs, it is instead atool to critically engage with these modes of production within the cultural field. In a strange twist, I think that without realising it, free art is
not a cultural juxtaposition of free software but its cultural counterpoint,
maybe an unknowing opponent. Free art really is a space of intervention, that seem to share some utopian similarities with the Temporary
Autonomous Zone (TAZ), an idea developed in 1991 by American anarchist writer Hakim Bey, who then promoted the techno culture-derived
idea of creating autonomous territories at the edges of control structures,
literally operating as zones inter-dites in the network.84 However, something is very different here, and Moreau does not have a very high opinion of such undefined approaches which, according to him are basicallyignorant of the subtleties and reality of the network.85 This difference84

See Hakim Bey, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 2003).
85
Moreau, “Le Copyleft Appliqué à La Création Hors Logiciel. Une Reformulation Des

145

is the strict territoriality generated by the constituent effect of the couple definition-license. Here, free art as a counter-hegemonic force, goesbeyond the performativity and resistance by trying to plant its own ideological state apparatus.86
Similar to the copyleft hack from Stallman, that creates software freedom by establishing a relationship with the same copyright that confines
it, Moreau and the participants of Copyleft Attitude, challenge the spectacle by becoming visible and legitimate within its own apparatus. Moreau,
who remains highly critical of the impact made by the work from French
theorist Guy Debord,87 does not believe in an ephemeral, poetical, invisible intervention. Instead, in order to truly establish a territory of artistic freedom, the FAL supporters seek legitimacy, and the license is, in
its initial design, promoted as nothing other than a useful tool to claim
and protect an artistic territory. So if the analogy with the cultural field,
quoted above, seems at first to promote a neoliberal argument of the necessary disruptive role of the artist, it actually operates differently, because by creating a safe haven for these practices it radically differs fromthe process of creative destruction88 that is associated with the economic
instrumentation of artists. Similarly, this is also the reason why free art
bares little resemblance to anti-copyright practices, and not just becauseof their divergent legal anatomy,89 but simply in terms of tactics. If De-

Données Culturelles ?” 243.
In reference to Louis Althusser, “Idéologie et Appareils Idéologiques d’État,” La Pensée 151 (1970).
87
Moreau, “Le Copyleft Appliqué à La Création Hors Logiciel. Une Reformulation Des
Données Culturelles ?” 3.1.1.2.2.1 Revue Potlatch, anti-copyright.
88
In reference to Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
89
Cramer, “Anti-Copyright in Artistic Subcultures.”86

146

bord was a drifter, Moreau wants to be a settler.
To be sure, here I mean that in order to become useful and resist theevanescence of former artistic reflection on authorship and intellectual
property, free art needs to make a pact with the devil. In particular if on
the one hand the digital aesthetics modelled by CAE, inspired by Lautréamont’s ideas,90 proposed a practice against an authoritarian capitalisationof culture and for the free circulation of ideas within the network, freeart on the other hand had to make legitimate the machine responsible forthis very same authoritarian capitalisation in order to implement suchpractices in legal code. While anti-copyright practices intended to ignore
legal constraints, free art instead tries to manipulate the legal system tooccupy permanently the cultural landscape, and is establishing, just likefree software, a kingdom within the kingdom, in the form of yet anotherGemeinschaft emulation. Here thus appears a paradox. Using terms from
American activist David Bollier, in order to support the creation of an “unregimented work space”91 —as part of a process to reclaim the commonsand to enable creative endeavours—the regimenting and bureaucratisation of such space is unavoidable. That said, the control over such spaces
can be implemented differently to enable, not a complete freedom forany sort of experiments within universal commons, but instead favour
singular practices that are only common and meaningful for a few. Thisis the reason why for instance, free software and free art are structured
in an opposite inverted way: the FSF sets a broad ethical context with

90
91

Critical Art Ensemble, “Recombinant Theatre and Digital Resistance.”
David Bollier, Silent Theft : The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 9.

147

Stallman’s GNU manifesto, in which the question of functional usefulness of GPL’ed software permits the organisation and classification of its
production, while Copyleft Attitude sets a broad functional frameworkwith the FAL, in which the question of ethics is both articulated within
and help structure the works created in this work space.

3.4

Artistic Freedom versus Software Freedom

So far in this chapter, I have shown with GNUArt and the FAL two typesof cultural appropriation of the free software template applied to the artistic domain. Referring back to the previous chapter, I have also explained
the affiliation between all these appropriations and free software, during the cultural diffusion of the latter, and how such link became further
articulated in the aggregative Creative Commons and deliberative freeculture definition. However, in the process irreconciliable differences
have appeared. As I have shown already in the sections above, the verytransposition of free software to free art shows that notions like usefulness, purposes, and intentions vary greatly between the FSF, GNUArt,
and Copyleft Attitude. What is more, this particular discrepancy is very
illustrative of my argument showing that such software freedom has beensuccessful in a broader context, not because of its underlying ideology,
but because of its formula, its template for emulating communities, andthe way it can abstract and generalise a struggle, so that it can be applied
to other cultural contexts and ideologies.
That said, it does not mean that Stallman was completely disconnected148

from the development of these projects. As with the OpenContent licensefrom Wiley who consulted both Stallman and Raymond at the time of its
creation,92 Vidovic and Moreau both corresponded extensively with theleader of the FSF, before, during, and after the development of their respective projects.93 At the time, Stallman who solely used verbatim copying permissions for the publishing of his writing—and who is now alsousing non-free culture CC NonCommercial and Noderivs CC licenses94 —was troubled by the very principle of porting his software freedom to another cultural domain such as art, and even questioned the necessity andviability of such an idea. In particular, Vidovic and Stallman coresponded
extensively on that matter even before the creation of GNUArt.95 In Stallman’s view, it seems that cultural expressions are strictly split between
objects of entertainment and tools to get things done, with the latter possibly helping us understand the fixation on the usefulness of software.
This dichotomy should not be shocking however, as I have shown in thefirst chapter, his post-scarcity society as envisioned in the GNU manifesto
is essentially a binary world where leisure alternates with work, and thisseparation is naturally echoed in his definition of culture: entertainment
or software useful for working.

For novels, and in general for works that are used for entertainment,
noncommercial verbatim redistribution may be sufficient freedom
for the readers. Computer programs, being used for functional purposes (to get jobs done), call for additional freedoms beyond that,92

See Chapter 1.
Mails from Vidovic and Moreau to author, 2013-2014.
94
Richard M. Stallman, “Richard Stallman’s Personal Page,” 2017, https://stallman.org.
95
Mail to author, May 8th 2014.
93

149

including the freedom to publish an improved version.96

Generally speaking and as opposed to free art, in his view culturalexpressions are not equal, hence the need to classify and order them.
Such an approach also differs from the broad one in the Freedom Defined project, where according to their FAQ, the free culture definition
concerns “works of the human mind (and craft),”97 a category comprehending “art works, free software works, free hardware design, machine
design, whatever,”98 and that is, according to the project, “a well-defined
philosophical concept.”99 Similarly, CC treats works in a broad manner,and the CC licenses can be applied to “any type of work, including educational resources, music, photographs, databases, government and public
sector information, and many other types of material.”100 Stallman however does not see cultural works and expressions as equal. He makes
a notable distinction between: functional works, like the software that
I use to write this thesis; representative works, such as the text of thethesis; and finally, what he calls aesthetic or entertaining works, which
following the same line of example, would be the unlikely derived dramatisation of my research into a TV series. However, it would be a misunderstanding to think such a classification means that Stallman only cares formass produced forms of entertainment. Despite his crude programmatic

96

Stallman, Free Software, Free Society, 87.
Contributors to the Freedom Defined Wiki, “FAQ,” 2015, http://freedomdefined.org/
FAQ.
98
Ibid.
99
Ibid.
100
Creative Commons, “Frequently Asked Questions,” 2016, https://creativecommons.
org/faq/.

97

150

simplification of culture, he is also known for sharing openly his distaste
for the Hollywood film industry and the like,101 and is quite supportiveof the filk music scene,102 a folk derived participatory music genre linked
to science-fiction fan communities, in which derivative, interpretative, reenactive, and all sorts of appropriative transformations are central to thissocial music genre.103 As a result it would seem surprising for Stallman
to not understand the notion of free art, given the attempt of the latterto try to address cultural commodification.
It is interesting that unlike Freedom Defined or CC for which cultural
works and expressions are equal, and for which it is up to the author topick whatever license may fit, Stallman’s classification instead implies
that depending on the type of work or cultural expression created, there
is an optimal license to be used. Stallman’s reluctance to embrace something like free art is therefore linked to his personal beliefs and pragmaticconcerns: first, the fear of misrepresentation or misinterpretation of
one’s thoughts thus protected with verbatim and non-derivative clauses,
which can be linked back to his prototyping habit to iteratively perfect
the free software definition, and carefully maintain throughout theyears a growing FSF glossary which defines and explains the words he isusing and those that he is not;104 and second, the problem of economics,

101

See Timothy Maciag, Dr. Richard Stallman: Copyright Vs. Community, Lecture Recording (San Francisco: Internet Archive, 2011), 1:19:00, https://archive.org/
details/Dr.RichardStallmanCopyrightVs.Community.
102
Richard M. Stallman, “Writing the Free Software Song,” 2003, https://web.archive.org/
web/20031011123901/http://www.gnu.org/music/writing-fs-song.html.
103
See Henry Jenkins, “‘Strangers No More, We Sing’: Filking and the‘ Social Construction of the Science Fiction Fan Community,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture
and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (1992; repr., New York: Routledge, 2001).
104
See Free Software Foundation, “Words to Avoid (or Use with Care) Because They

151

that is simply the issue of sustaining the production of free cultural
non-software works, for which he cannot think of any suitable model,
and explaining why regarding his category of aesthetic or entertaining
works, he believes that a reform of copyright is ultimately needed
instead.105 Of course on the first point, Stallman holds a conservative
position that seems to be from another time, yet given his knowledgeof the digital medium he used to express, publish and distribute his
ideas, I think his stance is more closely related to questions of verifiability and authenticity of documents and transactions, as discussed in
crypto-anarchist and cypherpunk circles, rather than it is a disregard
for all sorts of creative literary transformations. Regarding the second
point—the financial sustainability of free cultural production—while thedevelopment of working business plans appeared in the nineties for free
software,106 this is not the case for non-software and non-hardware freeculture which is still struggling today to showcase convincing models of
economic sustainability.107
In the end, the articulation of cultural freedom versus software freedom is also part of a larger prototyping process, where nothing is set isstone or definitive, hence today’s official position of the FSF to neither
clearly oppose nor endorse the notion of free art, as expressed on their

Are Loaded or Confusing,” 2016, https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.
en.html.
105
See Richard M. Stallman, “Let’s Share!” OpenDemocracy, 2002, https://www.
opendemocracy.net/media-copyrightlaw/article_31.jsp.
106
Robert Young and Wendy Goldman Rohm, Under the Radar : How Red Hat Changed
the Software Business– and Took Microsoft by Surprise (Scottsdale: Coriolis, 1999).
107“Sustainable Models for Shared Culture : Case Studies and Policy Issues,” research
report (CONSERVAS/Xnet, Stichting Kennisland, World-Information Institute, National Hellenic Research Foundation/National Documentation Centre, 2013).

152

website:

We don’t take the position that artistic or entertainment works must
be free, but if you want to make one free, we recommend the FreeArt License.108

While the FSF texts tend to strongly push forward their doctrine—asshown in the way assurance and desire to rally are articulated in the GNU
manifesto—what such non-position shows, is the ideological incompatibility of the many groups and individuals that are too often conflated into
one cohesive whole.

108

Free Software Foundation, “Licenses,” 2016, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.
en.html.

153

Interlude
So far in this chapter, I have built upon the argument that free software isessentially the abstraction of a struggle, in the form of a template that canbe culturally appropriated by others, and therefore also removed from its
original context, creating a divergence of discourse within the extended
family of free and open source things. Most notably in the first sectionof the chapter, I have shown that proto-free culture efforts like free art
present fundamental differences with free software from which it is derived. What is more, yet not so surprising from the template hypothesis,
free art has co-existed historically in the proto-free culture era as two
different concepts, that did not merge, precisely because they both proposed two different ideas of artistic freedom. To be sure, and going backto the link I made in the first chapter in the context of agonistic pluralism,
such differentiation should not be understood as a failure of constructing
so called commons or establishing globalised cooperative economics, butinstead as a healthy sign of cultural diversity.
The free software ontology is also echoed in free art in its form, thatis a system in which practices and production gravitate around an authoritative centre that works as both reference and model. The closer to154this centre, the closer the practice is aligned with, and becomes a direct
manifestation of the ideology at hand. For instance in free software, thismeans that the work is deemed useful enough to be accepted by Stallman to be part of GNU, while in free art, this means that an artist is able
to engage directly with other artists within Copyleft Attitude. As one
moves further away from the centre of influence, a more neutral zone
is visible where what is produced can be listed somehow officially andbased on specific criteria, as seen with the Free Software Directory (FSD)
and the free art Liste des Oeuvres. Even further away, in this last remote
cultural circle, different practices co-exist with little to no influence fromthe centre
I want to be precise that this circular ontology is not specific to free
software and free art. As a matter of fact, it can also be found in any otherproto-free, pseudo-free, and open content and free culture projects. For
instance Creative Commons follows the same logic of différance.1 At afirst level, the CC website presents works and projects that are selectedby the organisation to showcase projects which illustrate perfectly thefunction and usefulness of their license. For instance the 2011 CC samples of “cultural creativity in ‘the commons’ ”2 showcased a collection of
instrumental music tracks by American musician Trent Reznor’s industrial rock project Nine Inch Nails, released under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
It was used to exemplify a CC economic model in which the artist canstill benefit from exclusive licensing and the royalties from collecting so-

1
2

Derrida, Marges de La Philosophie, La Différance.
Creative Commons, “Culture,” 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110109095424/
http://creativecommons.org/culture.

155

cieties for their work, yet at the same time allow their audience to freely
distribute, share and remix the work as long as it is not for commercial
purpose. Then at a second level, many web platforms, software applications, for individual or collaborative use, can rely fully or partly on CC
licensed work from their users—from YouTube to Wikipedia or Flickr, toname a very few—yet maintaining a role of moderation to validate or
not the contributions, based on different more or less explicit end-user
license agreement (EULA), terms of service (TOS), or Code of Conduct(COC). These terms of various nature may contradict or limit the effectiveness or the license, for economic purposes as explained in Chapter 2
with Thingiverse’s terms of use, or for ethical reasons, similar to the way
free art is moderated in Copyleft Attitude “Liste de Oeuvres”. And finallyat a third level, CC licenses can be used by any groups or individuals whowill distribute their work across public online forums, personal or commercial websites, and motivated by rather diverse beliefs and intentions
as I will highlight in the interviews presented in the coming chapter.
Before looking closer to possible ambiguity and misunderstandings resulting from such dispersion—which I will do in the last chapter of thecurrent Part 2—I will now examine the sort of free-range free culture
practices found in the long-tail of this cultural diffusion. Indeed, until
now I have been mostly focussed on the epicentre and immediate surrounding of these different variants of the free software cultural diffusion. By doing so, I have essentially shown that the cultural appropriation of the free software template has permitted the constitution of newcommunities, that started to rely and articulate their own interpretationof cultural freedom, then made explicit by the writing of definitions, li156

censes, as well as publishing and collecting things that reinforce theirideology. In this first-stage appropriation it became clear that the resulting language-games could not form a coherent whole, and this is fine, but
perfect coherence could be found nevertheless within and at the proximity of these communities. However, it is important to keep in mind thatwhat constitutes these groups is of course public, and is also actively
communicated and propagated as part of a desire for wider ideologicaladoption and expansion. As a consequence, and to give a concrete example, an artist could stumble upon the FAL and start using it without
joining the Copyleft Attitude mailing list, and without reading anything
about the notion of free art, except maybe for a Wikipedia summary, an
abstract in a licensing guide, or a link from a list of approved licenses forfree culture or open knowledge. The same goes for a programmer and
the GPL, and this point can be obviously quickly generalised for any individual in regards to any license. So in this section, I argue that the consequence of this is the existence of a second-stage cultural appropriation,in which the ideological constituency of the appropriated free software
template, becomes in turn another template for other interpretations andintentions to be formed by other groups or individuals that were not partof the first-stage epicentres described so far.
This second-stage cultural appropriation developed notably in theearly noughties as a quick follow-up to the proto-free culture era. It
declined with the raise of a more defined free culture, when, paradoxically, less defined notions of sharing, commons, and open source,
became new curatorial topics for large generalist media art festivals
and exhibitions with little to no connections with free and open source
157

practices,3 and to finally find their way, even further diluted today inthe visual contemporary art discourse,4 or technically re-framed as partof a revival of interactive or generative art.5 While it is beyond thescope of this research to map thoroughly this under documented partof art history, having been involved deeply in some of these groups
during the peak of this second-stage cultural appropriation, as statedin this thesis introduction, it became progressively clear for me thatthe artists and hackers involved at the time either individually or as
collectives, had all their own specific understanding of cultural freedom,that did not necessarily overlap or were compatible. If one listens to
the artists behind the works, performances, installations, lectures, andworkshops programmed throughout the noughties in artist-run art
festivals that promoted the use of free software and free culture licenses,
such as Piksel in Bergen, LiWoLi in Linz, make art in Poitiers, Junctionsin Brussels, OpenLab in London, to name a very few, it is obviousthat their intentions and interests varied greatly, from the technicalexploration of versatile free software tools, to anti-capitalist forms ofengagement provided by the idea of community developed tools.6 It was

3

4
5
6

NetArtCommons, “Open_Source_Art_Hack,” 2002, https://web.archive.org/web/
20020528032912/http://netartcommons.walkerart.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/10/
0515240&mode=thread.
Leslie Fritz Lisa Schiff and Eugenio Re Rebaudengo, “Open Source: Art at the Eclipseof Capitalism” (Galerie Max Hetzler; Press Release, 2015).
Google Inc., “DevArt. Art Made with Code,” 2014, https://devart.withgoogle.com.
For a good sampler of such broad interests, I recommend watching the documentaries FLOSSOFÍA, about Piksel and make art festivals, Ernesto Romero, FLOSSOFÍA:El Software Libre en el Arte, Film (México: Centro Multimedia del Centro Nacionalde las Artes, 2009), and the LiWoLi09 video interviews, Annalisa Cannito, Chui Yong
Jian and Santiago Bence, Arts Meets Radical Openness, Online video (Linz: Servus.at,2009). Similarly the 2005 Underneath The Knowledge Commons edition of Mute magazine, offers interviews from active artists and hackers, that already showcases the158also not uncommon for tension and conflict to rise between these groups
and individuals, when it was apparent that there was no particular
ideological alignment or shared valued to start with.7
All that said, regardless of the variety of discourse, and next to theusual ethics versus economics split already present in the free software
versus open source discourse, it was possible to discern in this long-tailthree different emphases: production, product, and process. During thewriting of this dissertation I was able to conduct several semi-structured
interviews with practitioners involved in the practice of free-range protofree and free culture, and it became clear these were indeed cardinal references to navigate within and make sense of the apparent cultural randomness found in these practices. I decided for this text to focus in particular on three discussions that were the most illustrative and articulateof these aspects, and each of them will be presented in their own section:
the tools and the means of production for Basque noise and improvisa-

7

plurality of voices present at the time, Anthony Iles, “Free Labour or Social Sculpture,” Mute 2, no. 1 (2005): 10–17. More recently, the book Conversations, present asimilar diversity in the form of transcripts from several discussions “between developers and designers involved in the wider ecosystem of Libre Graphics”. See Xavier
Klein Christoph Haag and Femke Snelting, Conversations: I Think That Conversations
Are the Best, Biggest Thing That Free Software Has to Offer Its User (Brussels: Constant
Verlag, 2015). Last but not least the round of interviews conducted in 2009 during theWinter Camp event, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam,
also testify the discrepancy of interests and intentions between those of the invitedgroups that integrated notions of free culture as part of their networked practices,see Gabriella Coleman, Geert Lovink, Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle, Winter Camp
09: From Weak Ties to Organized Networks Ideas, Reports and Critiques (Amsterdam:
Institute of Network Cultures, 2009).
A good illustration of this was the feud between the openFrameworks toolkit
and Piksel workshop communities, regarding the licensing of the former, and ultimately what such licensing meant ideologically. See Gisle Fr0ysland, “[Piksel]
Who’s Afraid of the GPL?” 2010, http://piksel.no/cgi-bin/mailman/private/piksel/
2010-March/005048.html, mailing list thread.

159

tion artist Mattin, the final outcome and its distribution for American
cartoonist and animator Nina Paley, and the process of making where
the distinction between production and product becomes blurred, with
French graphic designers Stéphanie Villayphiou and Alexandre Leray. Finally in a fourth subsection, I will discuss a particular case of free cultural
production where free culture is not only a vessel, but also a subject andartistic material.

160

Chapter 4
The Practice of Free-Range
Free Culture

4.1

Mattin - Production

Basque noise and improvisation artist Mattin, is know for his multiple
music projects and identities, as well as for a very broad range of noise
related sonic experimentations and performances (Figure 4.1). There arequite a few printed and online interviews about his work as a musician
in that regard, but this is not what I want to discuss here. Instead, what
motivated me to talk with Mattin was his very particular attention to themeans of production and the active role, mission even, that he believes
an author should have in relation to cultural productions, and how suchrole relates to the use of free software.
Mattin started to use free software in 2004 while participating in161

Metabolik HackLab Bilbao in the Basque Country.1 He became further
engaged with these tools in contact with fellow noise artist and musician
Julien Ottavi from the French APO33 collective in Nantes, and by attending other workshops organised by other artist collectives busy with theuse and the development of free software for their practice. This is how
I met Mattin for the first time, as part of a 2004 Pure Data workshopthat I was co-teaching and held at Mute magazine in London, but it took
us a decade to start a discussion about the meaning and context of thethings that we were interested in. For Mattin, there exists notably aclear separation between the tools used for the creation of, the work of
art itself, its performance, and its reproduction. In particular, his mainconcern lies in the artist’s engagement with the productive apparatus.
To give a bit of context to Mattin’s thought, in his 1934 essay The Author as Producer,2 German critic Walter Benjamin offered an understanding of authorship in the light of, and at the meeting point, of different
Marxist traditions at the time. In his text, Benjamin especially opposed
two situations, one in which the author supplies a productive apparatus
without changing it, and one in which the author engineers this apparatus
to change it as part of a counter-hegemonic effort. For Mattin, who believes that working artists should be concerned with the means of theirartistic production, this essay has become a central reference, and thereason why he sees a connection between Benjamin’s critique of cultural
production with the ideas of transparency, openness, and participation

1
2

The text from this section is based on a semi structured interview with Mattin, on
the 23rd of January, 2014, Berlin, Germany.
Benjamin, “The Author as Producer.”162

in the way free software is put together, distributed, and possibly modified by autonomous communities. The latter can be at first surprising,
given that Mattin is not a software developer, and in his case this revolutionary engineering position of the author could turn out supplying
unknowingly another production apparatus masqueraded as a counterhegemonic effort. When I asked him about the way he might be romanticising free software production in one of his text,3 he admitted a certain ambivalence towards the principle of cooperation and socialisation
found in free software. If on the one hand he believes that they have thepotential to challenge the autonomy of art, used here in the context ofthe self-governance of art production, he also believes on the other handthat there is a darker side to such novel forms of cooperation, in whichthese efforts are in fact means of survival in disguise. He explained thatin his opinion people nowadays are forced to collaborate on software,
given economic pressure and thus reducing such co-actions to methods
for individual gains.
Here again the spectre of Benjamin, and his mixed views regarding therise of technological means of art reproduction,4 seems to resurface, andthis may be the reason why, if Mattin sees the usefulness of software freedom regarding the means of production of his work, at the same time herefuses to engage with free culture when it comes to the disseminationand distribution of his production. This is particularly visible with his

34Mattin, “Anti-Copyright: Why Improvisation and Noise Run Against the Idea of Intellectual Property,” in Noise & Capitalism, ed. Anthony Iles and Mattin (San Sebastián:Arteleku, 2009).
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”163

music label Free Software Series started in 2007,5 where he invites noise,
experimental, and improvisation sound artists, who use and write free
software as part of their practice. The resulting works are available online via the non-profit public domain and free culture supporter online
digital library Internet Archives, and a limited edition of CDs are also
produced. Each release follows a template in which the invited artists list
the software and tools they use. But what is striking with Free Software
Series is that unlike many other classic labels or net labels, where contracts and licenses are imposed on the artist, with this label they are free
to choose how they want to legally publish their work. As a result, inspite of using a core free culture reference with the term free software,
Mattin’s label is also typified by a miscellanea of licenses, non-free personal and fantasy licenses, pseudo-legal statements, free culture licenses,
and sometimes more simply, a single anti-copyright notice written on
the back cover, which also happens to be Mattin’s way of distributing his
own work. Mattin accepts the legal pragmatism of free software licenses
when applied to the creation of software tools, but refuses to apply thesame principle to his work, or impose it on the fellow artists of his label. According to him, the notion of licenses presuppose too much about
what a work of art is supposed to do, what is an author, a producer, andthis is simply incompatible with a practice that constantly questions thisframework. As a result, the label is not just a platform to showcase a

5Mattin, “Free Software Series,” 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20071016063358/
http://www.freesoftwareseries.org/.

164

Figure 4.1: Mattin at make art festival

Photo: Olivier Laruelle, 2009, CC0165

certain genre of work, but also a strategy to preserve their aura,6 or atleast diminish their loss, given the agonistic pluralism of possible meansof reproduction it presents.
So in the context of a free-range proto-free or free cultural art practice, authorship needs to be scrutinised particularly in relationship to
capitalism. As Mattin mentioned to me, these modes of distribution andreproduction imply the need to enforce and police the use of his work,and also reveals the secret obsession of artists wondering about how
they will be treated by posterity. So instead of accepting without hesitation a normalised notion of authorship, he seeks to trigger discussion.
Connecting back with the particular strategy seen earlier of the FAL todefuse the spectacular via legitimacy and visibility, for Mattin the recuperation of the spectacle is part of the game, and has been completelyinternalised. He has no problem with being partly absorbed as part of acultural agenda, and does not see the need to resist it with licenses, whatmatters is the impact noise has on a system in terms of artistic freedom
and self-organisation.7 So while Mattin refers to Benjamin, and given his
appreciation for Debord’s work,8 maybe the engineering author would
be best described in his case as a saboteur author.

67
8

In reference to Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.”
Mattin, “Anti-Copyright,” 173.
See Dan Warburton, “Mattin,” Paris Transatlantic, 2009, http://www.
paristransatlantic.com/magazine/interviews/mattin.html.

166

4.2

Nina Paley - ProductOne thing that the cultural appropriation of free software by artists
demonstrates very well is the distinction between tools and what they
are used for. This is an important point that is not necessarily visible
when free culture becomes an over generalising umbrella for all things
free and open. Therefore when looking at artists operating within the
proto-free or free culture discourse, it is essential to find where thesenotions of openness and freedom are articulated in their individual
practice. If some practitioners, like Mattin, concentrate essentially on
the production pipeline to elaborate their critique of the culture industry,others do the exact opposite and instead put the emphasis on the meansof distribution and publishing, which is the case for American cartoonist
and animator Nina Paley.9

Paley’s work needs no introduction foranyone familiar with free culture. Her 2008 multi awards animated film
Sita Sings the Blues (Figure 4.2) became the archetype of free culture
success, and more particularly the validity and relevance of CC licenses.
For the first time, a free cultural work gained significant popularity andwas screened within traditional film industry circuits. When I asked her
how she ended up releasing such a work under a free culture license,
what she told me would provide the perfect fit for a Creative Commons
PR success story or an anecdote from a Lessig essay. But as it turns out,
Paley knew very little about free software and free culture during the
production of her feature film. However, at the final stage of the work

9This section is based on a semi structured interview with Paley, on the 12th of April
2013, Madrid, Spain.

167

she learned the hard way how convoluted copyright and public domain
could be, and her frustration led her to the discovery of free culture.
She explained to me that in her work she had used samples fromrecords of nineteen twenties American Jazz Age singer Annette Hanshaw, that Paley thought were in the public domain. Unfortunately,
copyrights for some technical and compositional elements of the records
were still held, and as an independent film maker she was personallyliable for a $220,000 bill, a mandatory step to settle with the copyrightholders before having the work distributed. Through negotiation andloan, she was eventually able to license the music for a quarter of theoriginal demand, but what is important here is that while researching
about rights clearance, she came across the 2005 essay The Surprising
History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World,10 from
American software developer Karl Fogel. Through the essay, that lauds
without surprise the stereotypical battle of Stallman against closed
source and proprietary software, she was introduced to the generaltheme of free and open source software struggle. Moreover, she told methat she found in this struggle similarities with the problems and frustration she was facing with the final distribution of her work. As a result,
she would eventually join Fogel in 2009 in the QuestionCopyright.org
nonprofit organisation, an effort to promote public debate aroundcopyright and art. With this newly acquired affinity with the worldof free and open things, she then naturally chose the copyleft-inspired

10Karl Fogel, “The Surprising History of Copyright and the Promise of a Post-CopyrightWorld,” 2005, http://questioncopyright.org/promise.

168

Figure 4.2: Sita Sings the Blues

Still Frame: Nina Paley, CC0, 2008

169

CC BY-SA license for her animated film, presenting the free cultural
publishing of her work as promotional copies, so as to avoid extra
licensing from copyright holders. No wonders why she became a poster
child for free culture.
The peculiarity of her situation though, is exemplary of the diversity ofopinions that are gathered as free culture. Indeed, as I explained in Chapter 2, under the free culture definition, both the FSF software freedom of
the GPL and the cultural freedom of CC BY-SA sit together in harmony.
But so much for the theory. In practice, and as discussed in the previous
chapter with Stallman’s own resistance to publish his texts under free culture licenses, the reverse situation also exists: Paley does not directly use
free software in the making of her work. What is more, she explained tome that she was still using the now dated 2005 Macromedia Flash 8 software,11 even though many new version have been released since then.
Paley said she was sticking with this particular version because of a feature that was removed in later iterations of the software. As a response,
her position was to resist the idea of upgrading this software for the sakeof it, refusing to buy more expensive versions, that, while claiming theusual productivity increase argument to justify bumping a version number up, whilst actually her oppinion supporting a counter-productive system. So even though this story is the kind of anecdote on which the FSF
and OSI usually build their narrative of software liberation and vendor
lock-in,12 Paley, instead of jumping in the free and open software bang-

11

A very specific Mac OS version of the multimedia authoring software which at thetime of our interview was owned by Adobe and was at version 14.1.
12That is to say that the top-down decision to remove the feature is a typical disadvan-170wagon, twisted the situation by continuing to use her old proprietarynon-free software to create new free culture.
When I asked her why not simply drop closed source and proprietary
software and use free and source software instead, I received in response
a rather bleak personal view of the state of free software animation tools.
Put simply and according to her, she would not be able to create anythingwith the same fluency as she had with proprietary tools. Paley told methat she had purchased in the past a machine dedicated for running andlearning how to use a GNU/Linux distribution, but this did not work out
for her. She was however not ready to give up just yet, and this is why she
joined the 2013 Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) in Barcelona, a meetingfor developers and users of free and open source software in the realm oftype, graphic design, illustration, and also the place where our interview
took place. For her the conference was an opportunity to find renewed
motivation, and to investigate the possibility of contributing financiallyto the development of specific free animation tools. However, at the endof the event, and after several discussions triggered by the presentationof her work in relation with free software and free culture, she found herself forced to admit that based on her needs, it would still take years to be
as proficient with free software as she was now with closed source tools.
According to her, one of the main problem she identifies with current free
software animation tools is that there are simply not enough developers,
and not enough moments of development in which users and developers
can interact with each other, not remotely using IRC, mailing lists, or web

tage of closed source software, in which little to no control is given to the users.

171

forums, but face to face in the same room, for extensive periods of timesuch as a month or so, so as to thoroughly test and implement a particularfeature that is relevant for the user. Sadly, Paley’s frustration with free
software is not simply anecdotal. It remains an unfortunate illustrationthat switching between tools, and more particularly substituting known
non-free software for their supposedly equivalent free counterparts, iseasier said than done, particularly for the type of free and open source
software that aims at being a near drop-in replacement for known elements of a production pipeline, that has been for decades the closed andexclusive territory of the software industry.13 Paley does not take thisissue lightly and she told me it was the cause for considerable suffering,
not only because she greatly admires the free software movement, but
mostly because she admits that out of all her supporters, free software
users are the ones who understand the most what she is trying to dowith free culture; in her own words it was “painful in that way to not use
free software, but the most important thing is the art.” Unfortunately, instead of triggering a discussion, her presentation during LGM essentiallyattracted critique from the more dogmatic free software supporters anddevelopers, who could not comprehend why a non-free but expressive
tool could be superior to a free but less expressive tool for Paley.
Next to the question of expressibility, Paley told me that what matters the most for her is access to the work. She has no doubts that if a

13

For an overview of the usual challenges and obstacles for the adoption of free andopen source software, as a replacement for existing closed source and proprietary
workflows, see Amal Al Roumi, “Migrations to Free and Open Source Software: Motivations, Planning and Case Studies” (Master’s thesis, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos,2014).

172

work is liked, it will be copied no matter what, and instead of controlling this aspect she wants to concretely encourage it, hence the focus on
publishing the work with free culture licenses. She said that letting go ofher intellectual property was the best decision of her life, because in herview copyright is nothing more than a device of censorship and the inhibition of creativity, which is the same point made in the GNUArt project
discussed previously. In addition, she argued that intellectual property
rights do not only impact artists, but society as a whole because theyencourage ludicrous efforts to keep alive and scale systems of surveillance, control, and penalisation needed to enforce them.14 Paley believes
this will only lead to increasing civil unrest, an opinion that overlaps
with United Nations (UN) reports from Pakistani sociologist and activist
Farida Shaheed, who has recently articulated several sharp critiques ofintellectual property from the perspective of human rights.15
In that sense, in the case of Paley, free culture became a transitional device to help articulate her artistic intention and connect her practice with
cultural rights. I use the term transitional because today the cartoonist
and animator does not present herself as being a copyright reformist, but
as a copyright abolitionist. She explained to me that she also decided in2013 to re-license Sita sings the Blues under the much more permissive
CC0 license, another CC and free culture definition approved license.

14

One notable source of reporting on such issues is the blog TorrentFreak, started in
2005, and still very active at time of this writing. Lennart Renkema, “TorrentFreak,”
2005, https://torrentfreak.com.
15
See Farida Shaheed, “Statement by Ms. Farida Shaheed, SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR IN
THE FIELD OF CULTURAL RIGHTS,” research report (United Nations, 2015); Farida
Shaheed, “Report of the Special Rapporteur in the Field of Cultural Rights,” research
report (United Nations, 2015).

173

CC0 is more of a legal tool than a typical free culture license, permitting the waiver of as many rights as possible and is currently considereda valid free software, free culture approved license, and conformant license for the Open Definition. It is however not approved by the OSI for
the distribution of open source software.16 According to Paley having
her work under CC0 is still suboptimal, in regard to her intention to let
go of the entirety of her intellectual property, but it was the only way
to be as close as possible to the public domain. Going back to this ideaof free culture as a transitional device, what the work and experience ofPaley shows is that despite the territoriality of free culture licensing, thatwas particularly explicit in the counter-hegemonic position of the FAL,
these forms of distribution and publishing are not necessarily definitive.
Far from the cultural epicentre of these licenses, artists and their work
are able to move from one ideological perspective to another more freely,
making free culture more of a strategy rather than an end in itself.

16

The hesitation from the OSI to list CC0 as an acceptable open source license comesfrom the fact that CC0 essentially works in two steps: first it tries to waive as many
legal rights as possible to reach a near public domain status for the work; and a second
optional step, because the first step might not be possible in every jurisdiction, CC0provides a fall-back open source like license as permissive as possible. The issue for
the OSI is that this fall-back license explicitly convey protection for patent rightsthat may be linked to the licensed work. See Open Source Initiative, “What About
the Creative Commons ‘Cc0’ (‘Cc Zero’) Public Domain Dedication? Is That Open
Source?” 2017, https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero.

174

4.3

Stéphanie Villayphiou and Alexandre Leray- ProcessIf some practitioners tend to lean towards one particular side of production, or distribution of their work, others seek a certain balance in which
their engagement and critical response is equally represented in boththeir tools and what they make. To be sure, I am not referring here tosome sort of ultra dogmatic position that would seek to impose a freecultural purity in both the production and the product. As presented
earlier, this section looks into what I described as free-range free culture
practices, outsider free cultural producers, that is to say participants fromthe second stage cultural appropriation of the free software template byartists, and therefore far from the cultural epicentre and control fromwhich these licenses and definitions have been written in the first place.
As a consequence the alignment here of free software tools and free cultural work should not be understood as an extreme form of free cultural
practices, but more as an opportunity to redefine an existing artistic practice or genre,17 making in fact free culture an un-artistic process.18
To illustrate this process, I will now share elements of a discussion with
French graphic designers Stéphanie Villayphiou and Alexandre Leray.19

17

See de Valk, “Tools to Fight Boredom.”
In reference to American artist Allan Kaprow’s concept of the “un-artist”. See Allan
Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I (1971),” in Essays on the Blurring of
Art and Life, ed. Allan Kaprow and Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993); Allan Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part 2 (1972),” in Essays
on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Allan Kaprow and Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1993).
19
Some of the following writing is based on a semi-structured interview with Stéphanie
Villayphiou and Alexandre Leray, on the 5th of March, 2015, Brussels, Belgium.

18

175

I first met Villayphiou and Leray in 2007 when they were students in
the Media Design and Communication Master, at the Piet Zwart Institute (PZI), in Rotterdam, Netherlands. After their graduation in 2009
they started the graphic and media design studio <stdin>, and joined theOpen Source Publishing (OSP) collective between 2009 and 2010. Since
its infancy in 2006 as a branch of the Belgian art and culture organisation
Constant,20 OSP is a project that reflects on questions of design, process,and tools in the realm of graphic and print design using only free andopen source software.21 The particular focus of OSP, now an independent group, was not totally strange for the two designers. Villayphiou
and Leray told me that they had both been attracted to the culture offree software since their teenage years, but not immediatly in the context of unlearning and relearning graphic design practices, but rather asa knee-jerk reflex against the dominance of a very few software publishers in the late nineties. In fact Leray even recalled that as a high school
student, he once stuck anti-Microsoft stickers depicting the Linux kernel
penguin mascot, Tux, on the Windows-equipped machines of his school
computer classroom, even though at the time he had never used free software himself. Tux, the content looking penguin, had reached the same
status as other rebellious symbols such as images of Che Guevara, Bob
Marley, or The Sex Pistols, thanks to the free software and the GPL roman-

20

The group was initially formed in Brussels, Belgium, by a mixed group of graphic designers, artists and software programmers, Pierre Huyghebaert, Harrisson, Yi Jiang,
Nicolas Malevé, and Femke Snelting.
21
Matthew Fuller, “Open Source Publishing – Interview with Femke Snelting,” 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20090424080044/http://www.spc.org/fuller/
interviews/open-source-publishing-interview-with-femke-snelting/.

176ticised David against Goliath narrative regularly covered in popular techmagazines. Here, the abstraction of struggle offered by the free software
template would once again become the main grip for its further appropriation by a younger generation with no direct relation with engineering
culture or software development.
I do not mean to say that the relation that Villayphiou and Leray had
with free software was entirely superficial or naive, but it was an entry
point that would lead to their individuation as graphic designers reinventing their practice. In concrete terms, they explained to me that during
their formal education, their particular interest in web design, in which
both mark-up and programming languages are exposed, was instrumental in making them favour open standards and systems. From this point,
they were interested in linking programming and generative graphic design, something they first did during their study at the École supérieured’art et design de Valence (ESAD Valence) in France, and then exploredfurther at PZI. The latter course being particularly both sensible to andcritical of free and open source software culture,22 they were able to articulate more precisely what they found problematic with proprietary andclosed source software, turning their attraction to the free software abstracted struggle into something meaningful and relevant to their practice. Villayphiou and Leray told me that one of the most important issues was the normalisation of the skills and workflows in their line ofwork. This aspect was particularly important for the two designers, who

22

Florian Cramer, Michael Murtaugh and Aymeric Mansoux, “How to Run an Art
School on Open Source,” 2010, https://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon/oscon2010/
public/schedule/detail/12627.

177

had understood the 2006 disappearance of graphics, web, and design software publisher Macromedia, bought by Adobe, as the rise of a monopolythat would dictate through a single toolchain the means and methods oftheir professional activity. If this same incident had handicapped Paley,
and forced her to no longer upgrade her animation software, this vendor lock-in and top-down standardisation was instead an opportunity for
Villayphiou and Leray to reinvent their practice, and redefine graphic design.
The important distinction to make here is that the notion of freedom
and openness is not at the level of the source code, but at a higher level,
both in term of diversity and interoperability. In that regard, Villayphiou
and Leray’s position is much closer to the core principle of the Unix philosophy and its modular pipeline, than to the software liberation agendaof the FSF. Indeed, Villayphiou and Leray told me that they were notso much interested in using free alternatives to popular raster and vector graphics editors, such as GIMP for Adobe Photoshop and Inkscapefor Illustrator. They had no particular hatred per se for any proprietarygraphic design tools, and their question of empowerment goes further
than investigating the ownership of tools. They are rather calling attention to the way the software industry increasingly replaces the gestureof the practitioner with frictionless suites and workflows. From early on,
it has therefore also been important for OSP to perform the practice ofdesign publicly, metaphorically with their participation in free softwarecommunities and also literally with their Print Party series of events, as an
attempt to break the illusion of the perfect and idealised motion found in
the factory-like choreography between a dehumanised designer and their178

tools, as one of the founder of OSP, Dutch artist and designer Femke Snelting, once articulated.23 Their aim is to embed the reflection and experimentation with all sorts of free and open source software, as an indispensable element of design research. They admitted though that what they described as “ceaseless gymnastics”, was sometimes horrifying in the way
it forced them to constantly unlearn and relearn new things. What mightseem borderline masochist and unproductive given the self-imposed difficulties and challenge here, is in fact typical of the way some artists anddesigners engage with free software.24 If there is fetishism, it operates atthe level of a careful and individuating exploration of uncharted territories, in order to challenge the critical understanding of their craft.
Of course, such a position seems highly precarious given the competitive labour standards imposed by today’s neoliberal economics. When
Paley decided to stick with proprietary software, next to the question of
expressibility of the instrument, there was also the very pragmatic issue of time management and productivity. When I asked them about
this matter, they told me that for them this was irrelevant because theirmain interest was not in streamlining an assembly line, but of integrating
thoughtfully the means of production for every single project (Figure 4.3),
and learning from each other at OSP without any hierarchical construction or roles that are determined by the type of tools they use, and thetype of skills assumed by their profession. In their own words, this is not

23

Femke Snelting, “Awkward Gestures: Designing with Free Software,” 2008, http://
freeze.sh/_/2008/awkward/.
24
De Valk, “Tools to Fight Boredom.”179about “emboîter des boîtes à l’usine.”25 It does not mean that they live disconnected from the reality of the graphic design market, but it does mean
instead that time, labour, and energy are planned differently when they
are commissioned. Unlike the other examples of free software appropriation and inspiration seen so far in this chapter, the link between OSP andfree software can be understood as the twenty-first century resurgenceof the late ninetieth, and early twentieth century Arts and Crafts movement. The way the collective work echoes the critique made by Englishsocial thinker John Ruskin, and by which the movement was inspired, on
the issue of the division of labour brought about by the industrial revolution, and more particularly how works produced in factories are unfair
and dishonest.
For Ruskin, if the question of tool ownership is important, a more central aspect is the context in which they are used. He therefore makesa clear distinction between things produced manually, and those whichcome from a factory. According to him, the latter are lying, they pretend
to be the result of a thoughtful process, but unlike the outcome of craftsmanship they do not leave any record of intents, trials, successes andfailures.26 In that sense, even though practitioners like Villayphiou andLeray adopt a modernist stance in their desire to reshape graphic design,
there is at the same time in their approach, an underlying connection to amore historical form of hacking where crafting plays an important role.27

25“putting boxes in boxes in the factory”.
John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1880; repr., New York: Barnes & Noble
Digital Library, 2011), 43–45.
27
Levy, Hackers.

26

180

Figure 4.3: Snapshots from OSP design process and tools

Photos: OSP, FAL/CC BY-SA, 2014

181

So, while their practice exists within the second stage cultural appropriation of free software, and well after the code brutalism28 of some practices
in the proto-free culture era, the process they articulate is aligned with
the notion of “fanatical devotion to beauty”29 in software writing, the ideathat hacking becomes a medium like painting,30 in which writing beautiful programs is an art form like composing poetry or music,31 and wherepleasure is found in using and writing such tools.32 However such art
becomes itself linked to the notion of un-art I refered to earlier, because
it creates a situation of unlearning and relearning relative to the skills
assumed to be required in their work, while simultaneously promoting
their practice as a very classical definition of artistry.
As mentioned earlier, an interesting aspect of OSP is that the works
that they are commissioned to design, and the tools they might create aspart of the process, are all made available under free culture licenses: thesoftware is usually released under the GPL or the GNU Affero General
Public License (AGPL); their fonts are made available under the SIL Open
Font License (OFL); graphics works use the double licensing FAL and CC
BY-SA. Properly licensing their work is a matter of ethics for Villayphiou
and Leray, who believe that this mode of publication helps get rid of themyths of artistic geniuses and ex nihilo creations. This point seems para-

28

Simon Yuill, “Code Art Brutalism: Low-Level Systems and Simple Programs,” in
Read_me: Software Art and Cultures, ed. Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin (Aarhus:
Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, 2004).
29
Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters : Big Ideas from the Computer Age (Sebastopol:
O’Reilly, 2004), Hackers and Painters, p. 29.
30
Ibid.
31
Knuth, Literate Programming, Computer Programming as an Art.
32
Ibid.

182

doxical given that craftsmanship has been anyway historically positively
associated in hacker culture with individual recognition and talent,33 but
for them free culture licensing is a statement on copying which, unlike
appropriation art, is made to respect and honour the notion of authorship. As they explained to me, their decision to use copyleft licenses isalso a conscious choice to force sharing,34 and a way of paying tributeto all the free software tools they rely upon themselves. Once again, theplurality of voices in free culture becomes visible. If free software became a template for cultural appropriation that led to the creation of the
FAL, the FAL itself becomes in turn a new template to be appropriatedand re-contextualised in other practices. That’s why for OSP members
who are not linked to Copyleft Attitude, the idea of the FAL as a critiqueof the visual contemporary art market, becomes entirely replaced with acritically reinstated testimonial to authorship and craftsmanship. Whatis more, this re-contextualisation gets further fragmented within the designers collective itself, as Villayphiou and Leray commented on the factthat other participants in the collective are not comfortable with the distribution of their work under the FAL, which they believe is too niche, andtherefore would “require an extra act of contextualisation and seduction
to convince [their] public that is the right instrument for the job.”35 For
Dutch graphic designer and OSP member Eric Schrijver, there is also the
problem that neither CC licenses, nor the FAL, reflect properly his philo-

33

Levy, Hackers, 99–100.
I use the term force precisely to highlight the mechanism of copyleft licenses, wheresharing of modifications is mandatory when the work is transformed and published.
35
Email from OSP member Eric Schrijver to author, January 3, 2016.
34

183

sophical convictions, and in particular the fact that defining authorshipin a work is an arbitrary process prone to be influenced by socio-politicalbias or economic opportunism. Schrijver prefers nonetheless to employ
CC licenses because of their existing visibility in the cultural field, and iswilling to make a tradeoff between the precision of the intention and theeffect his work can have when distributed via more popular free culture
licenses.36 This is the reason why OSP decided to dual license some of
their assets under the FAL and the more popular CC BY-SA, even though
the two have been recently made compatible in 2014,37 hence creating via
licensing itself a meta-discourse on top of their own personal interpretation of what such licenses stand for. Similar to the example of the GCC
and Clang compilers discussed in Chapter 1, and the double inflection of
their licensed source code, the same duality repeats itself here again. The
meaning and the intention of using or making a free cultural work or expression will vary strongly depending on its licensing. Even though the
FAL and the CC BY-SA are already re-contextualised in this second stage
appropriation, that is to say that their purpose in the context of OSP havediverged from their original purpose, they are still distinct paratextual elements that translate into different meaning. What is unique though, isthat OSP does not see this as an issue, and their choice becomes an echo tothe plurality of voices that form the collective: they do not have to settle
for one single license but use dual-licensing instead to highlight the cultural diversity within the group, and put in place concurrent strategies

36
37

Email to author, January 6, 2016
Creative Commons, “ShareAlike Compatibility:
FAL,” 2014,
creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibility:_FAL.

184

https://wiki.

of distribution.
Finally, if sharing knowledge and learning, the record of its gesture, isthe most important part for the two graphic designers, they also recognise that this is also a point of friction in a collective where the use ofsoftware constantly challenge this social dimension of their craft. With
the engineering and industrial context of their tools, appears therefore an
overshadowing bargain between the intimate writing of software to be
used once for a specific work, and the maintenance and documentationof more reusable and efficient production frameworks.38

4.4

A Note on the Artistic Appropriation of theFree Cultural Discourse

With the examples of Mattin, Paley, Villayphiou, and Leray, I have shownthat the relationship with free and open source software and free culturallicensing, exists under the form of a well formulated partisan choice, uponwhich the accent of their engagement varies according to the needs oftheir practice, and according to their habitus, even if this articulation is
not ideologically aligned with the frameworks they are using. There are
however, other forms of appropriation of the free cultural frameworks
which I will address in the last section of this chapter. I want to mention

38

For an extensive analysis of the relationship between time and expressibility in open
source software written in the context of art practices, see Thor Magnusson, “Expression and Time: The Question of Strata and Time Management in Creative Practices Using Technology,” in FLOSS+Art, ed. Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk
(Poitiers: GOTO10, 2008).

185

the existence of works, in which the affiliation to free culture and similar ideas is not only paratextual, but made explicit by the material used
for making the work. The most interesting aspect of such works is how
they turn inner and idiosyncratic discussions within the realm of free
and open things, into an artistic medium. To illustrate this, I have chosen to discuss three works, Save the GNou!, Fibre Libre, and CC Ironies,
all of which appropriate the free software principles at different levels,
suggesting that if there is such a thing as free culture aesthetics, it does
not limit itself to the sole question of licensing.

4.4.1

Save the GNou!

As explained in the first section of this chapter, nineties new media art,and net art in particular, had championed a new form of digital appropriation art where borrowing, plagiarism, stealing, and quoting became botha method and instrumental in the development of network aesthetics operating as a smoke screen for all sorts of intentions.39 Abusing such asmoke screen was notably the principle tactic for irreverent French grouppavu.com,40 which collection of automated translation assisted Frenglish
pseudo entrepreneurial and pseudo avant-gardist web sites presented as“territoire libre du Net”41 was once described as the craziest part of the

39

Bosma, Nettitudes, A Deeper View.
An acronym for Popular Arts Value UPgrade, where UPgrade is used to refer to thetransforming methodologies used by the appropriation artists, who described theirformation at the time as a startUPgrade. Parts of this section are derived from email
exchanges with pavu.com member Jean-Philippe Halgand, during March 2013, andJanuary 2016.
41
Annick Rivoire, “Pas Vu Bien Vu,” Libération, 2002, 01/03/02.
40

186

French cyberspace.42
Launched in 1999, pavu.com is presented as an establishment specialised in “arts informatifs”, a concept described at the time by the groupas a form of artistic engineering and semantic reframing, operating on
top of information perceived as raw material and that could be extracted
outside of its original context.43 Shortly after its creation, pavu.com
released its MilleniumFlower numerical bouquet (MFL),44 under the formof five events and projects which were announced over five days, onseveral net art and culture mailing lists such as rhizome, syndicate,nettime, and 7-11. The series of works ranging from different formsof artistic appropriation, commercial exploitation, and commissioned
advertisements for other net artists, coincided with a time where thequestion of privatisation of the Internet was becoming more pressing
and started to impose limits to the new networked artistic territories
claimed by tactical media practices that had escaped the artificiality of
the white cube but now found themselves exposed to corporate regimes,
as best exemplified with the 1999 and 2000 domain name toywar between
the digital art group etoy and the online retailer eToys.45
If it is well beyond the scope of this text to cover in depth the whole

42

Ibid.
Alban Saporos, “Arts Informatifs? Un Monde Qui Pline! Un Entretien Avec
Clément Thomas (Pavu.com),” Archée 05/2001 (2001), https://web.archive.org/web/
20010606150015/http://archee.qc.ca/ar.php4?btn=texte&no=159&note=ok.
44
A pun referring to both the Mayflower event, and the marketing term bouquet
numérique used in France for the offering and combination of several digital broadcasting services and products, email to author, January 2, 2016.
45
Reinhold Grether, “How the Etoy Campaign Was Won: An Agent’s Report,” Leonardo
33, no. 4 (2000): 321–24.
43

187

Figure 4.4: Dépôt marque Française COPYLEFT

Extract from Bulletin officiel de la propriété intellectuelle, 99/42 NL, VOL.I, 1999

188

MFL,46 one of its five parts is however connected in a strange twist with
the notions of territoriality and copyleft discussed in Chapter 3. Thisparticular part entitled Save the GNou! The Copyright The Copyleft World
Campaign, was created as a sort of pseudo-hacktivist mock-critique protofree cultural campaign, using the free and open source software discourse
as material and inspired by late nineties email chain letters.47 At thecore of the propaganda was the call for the protection of a threatened
species called GNou, the French word for the Bovidae gnu, and of course
also the mascot since the eighties of the GNU project. The protection
campaign started notoriously in September 1999 with the trademark (Figure 4.4) of the word copyleft in France.48 Later in 2000, new variations
on the theme were added, in a form of a GNou Found Lands (GFL) organisation “fighting attempts to destroy Networked GNou free territories”, and “[p]reventing server space from becoming hunting companies’
monopoly.”49 Eventually, it was announced that to expand the GNou Reserve one could acquire a plot from the GFL,50 in the form a small graphic
file depicting a gnu, to be inserted and hosted on one’s website.
If French semiotician Roland Barthes had visited one of the websites

46

Or pavu.com for that matter. For more information, the following link lists several
texts and interviews which should give enough clues to start deciphering, or not,the world of this collective. pavu.com, “Théorie - Entretiens et Textes | Theory Interviews and Texts,” 2016, http://www.pavu.com/iaaf/theory.htm.
47
Email to author, January 2, 201648
Eric Chabrely, Jean-Phillipe Halgand and Elisabeth Laporte, “N° National : 99 811
487 ‘Copyleft’,” Enregistrement de marque (I.N.P.I. BORDEAUX, 1999).
49
Pavu.com, “GNou Found Lands - a Territory ! a Standard Unit ! a Market !” 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20031006012338/http://www.gnoufl.com/
territoireus.htm.
50
The GNou Reserve term itself was linked to yet another Frenglish play on words
derived from typical copyright notices: “Tous contents CopyGNou 2000, pavu.com,
All Right ! GNou Reserve”.

189from pavu.com after writing about the TV ads of French pasta brand Panzani,51 he may have rephrased the practice of “arts informatif” in simpler terms, that is to say the art of stripping the symbolism of an iconic
message so as to create confusion and deception given the pre-existing
connotation system within the appropriated material. Here, even though
the resulting collage is also a reaction to cultural transformations and privatisations happening at the time, instead of deriving the free software
template for their own purpose, pavu.com treated the FSF discourse andimagery as raw material to play with. The members of the group, who
did not know of the existence of GNUArt and who did not read the FAL
when it was released in 2000,52 but however had learned about copyleftfrom Moreau prior to the existence of Copyleft Attitude,53 obviously operated as pranksters and trolls. While such manoeuvres were known in
the field of tactical media,54 they did not impress Moreau, who will eventually qualify the trademarking of copyleft as an example of the artistic
stupidity, in reference to a comment by French artist Marcel Duchamp in
relation to un-reflective traditional art making.55 Regardless, looking today at the campaign from pavu.com it is undeniable that it both pre-dates
and is announcing a wider and more globalised form of “arts informat-

51

Barthes, L’Obvie et l’Obtus: Essais Critiques III, Rhétorique de l’image.
Email to author, March 11, 201353
Moreau, “Le Copyleft Appliqué à La Création Hors Logiciel. Une Reformulation Des
Données Culturelles ?” 614.
54
Known and popular, however also ambivalent in their potential political impact that
could be questionned. For a short discussion on that matter, see Mark Dery, “Vector
Block on Telecom Avenue: Mark Dery in Conversation with Critical Art Ensemble,”
Mute 10 (1998): 27–29.
55
Moreau, “Le Copyleft Appliqué à La Création Hors Logiciel. Une Reformulation Des
Données Culturelles ?” 614–15.
52

190

ifs”: Internet memes. As it turns out, on popular western imageboards
like 4chan’s /g/ or 8chan’s /tech/, to name the biggest at the time of writing, the practice of appropriating and radically transforming the free andopen source software discourse happens on a daily basis, with little regard to factualness or coherence, except for those practising it and who
use it as part of specific visual grammars and symbols, constantly providing a counterpoint in near real-time to whatever happens in the world.

4.4.2

Fibre Libre

If the approach of pavu.com to free culture relies on stripping away symbolism from its iconic message, other artists do the exact opposite byremoving the literal elements and make use of the remaining symbolic
images. By working with a material that is only a system of connotation, and which has lost its literal counterpart, the idea of free and open
source software as well as free culture, becomes a means to create newworks at a metaphorical level, and inspire methodologies to explore andframe existing practices from a new angle. To be sure, this is different
from the cultural appropriation of the free software template discussed
earlier. There is no literal functional adaptation but instead an inspiration
to understand and observe free software through the lens of an existing
practice.
This is the case with Fibre Libre (Figure 4.5), a 2009 event and artist’sbook, that documents the efforts of a group of people learning about free191

software while also learning how to make paper.56 It was initiated byAmerican bookmaker and letterpress printer Bridget Elmer as part ofOpen Edition.

Open Edition was founded in 2009 by Flatbed Splendor to explore
the philosophy of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software)through the medium of the artist’s book. In this exploration, theartist’s book is considered both for its potential as a free information
technology and as a free cultural work. As such, Open Edition is anattempt to extend the Free Software Foundation’s “four essential
freedoms” to the users of the artist’s book, integrating FLOSS withthe art of making books by hand. Open Edition advocates for theunderstanding and use of free software, particularly in the bookarts community, by supporting relevant practice, scholarship andpedagogy.57

Elmer initially discovered bookmaking via the zine and self-publishingculture, and saw a lot of similarities between those writing free software,and “those printing their books from redistributed lead type on the letterpress […] or making books of their own creation on a copy machine.”58
Fibre Libre is a way for Elmer to work through the similarities and differences of the two cultures, as a means to understand what free culture isabout, and share this with her friends and the artist’s book community.
The resulting book, which is limited to fifty handmade copies and published under the FAL, represents a narrative that unfolds both in space
and time. It derives an idealised understanding of the mechanism of collaboration and cooperation found in the production of free software, to56

Bridget Elmer, “Fibre Libre,” 2011, http://flatbedsplendor.com/wiki/index.php/Fibre_
Libre.
57
Ibid.
58
Email to author, April 23, 2011.

192

Figure 4.5: Fibre Libre

Photos: Bridget Elmer, 2011, FAL

193

permit another reading of what is constituent of book making that both
highlights and illustrates literally such elements. In this method, the different contributors to this event and workshop used, reused, and transformed each other’s recipes to make paper, down to the fiber createdfrom the pulp of their own clothing. Next to that, they learned the open
source programming framework Processing, as a means to visualise andkeep track of the usage and origins of each pulp vat used in the processof making the paper. The graphics generated are printed on the paper,
as well as the source code, whether they are instructions to make the paper, or the code for the generated visuals. Finally, this method is used
three times and will form the three parts of the final book, each new iteration builds upon the previous one so as to highlight and encourage
the progressive blending of the source code from the different Processing sketches, and the different instructions and pulps to make the paper
sheets.
The result is describe by Elmer in the form of a parallel between what
she calls objects and their source, and how the latter are produced.59 According to her the project has an educational purpose and see her intention as political in the way it tries to address a sense of disconnection in
the practice of book making:60

To sum up, we’ll fight for days on the listservs as to whether or
not polymer type prints as well as lead type. We’ll argue down to
the millimetre when it comes to our binding decisions. But we’ll just

59

Vamp & Tramp, “Flatbed Splendor,” 2013, http://www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/
f/flatbed-splendor.html.
60
Email to author, April 23, 2011.

194

fire up the Adobe Creative Suite, live trace our drawings and make anegative without ever understanding the code (written by someone
else!) that generates our content. This seems like a disconnect tome.61

The fact that Elmer’s approach to free culture is essentially metaphorical is very useful to understand the process of cultural diffusion in freeculture. Fibre Libre, while not using the free software template to create
a functional framework relevant to her practice and community, demonstrates clearly how this abstraction of the free software struggle can moveso easily from one field to another, and explain why many artists wereable to relate to its general idea and see similar patterns in the way thethings they make, highlighting in particular the contradiction betweena polymath desire to remain autonomous in one’s practice, yet articulate such independence within broader collaborative and cooperative networks.

4.4.3

CC Ironies

Another form of artistic appropriation of the free and open source discourse is also possible. For instance, artists can turn the question of
choice for licenses upside down, and instead use licensing itself as a way
to engage their audience directly with intellectual property issues in theart. An illustration of this is the 2007 CC Ironies series (Figure 4.6) byEnglish artist and writer Rob Myers, a work that takes the form of nested

61

Ibid.

195

art in which the artist articulates the tensions between authorship, appropriation, attribution, collaboration, copyright, and CC licenses at thethree levels of icons, indices, and symbols. Here, the iconic messages of
the appropriated images are not stripped of their symbolism, however,instead of generating meaning through their discreet and discontinued
arrangement, which would be the way in which such images are usuallyencountered, Myers creates a new symbolic interpretation by superposing these images. To be sure, the particularity of such collage is that thecontext and functionality of the images used has been deeply challenged.
Unlike the FAL—which as I discussed earlier was not understood by its
initiators as a work of art, in the sense that it did not claim any affiliation with artistic practices using the contract as medium—a series like CC
Ironies is instead a free culture addition to the notion of contract aesthetics, or to be more precise license aesthetics. Indeed, the making of thework was the result of a discussion between Myers, the Serbian artist duo
Marija Vauda and Nikola Pilipovic (MANIK), and English entrepreneur
David Bausola on the topic of copyleft as form, and that according toMyers, drew inspiration from Carey Young’s use of legal documents as
sculpture and installations.62 Here, a particular point of attention wasgiven to the social and legal form that copyleft is intended to be, and theway it can, or cannot, affect the aesthetic form of art.63 If the strategies
of pavu.com can be understood politically, they are not a direct politicalaction. This is not the case with Myers whose work is more militant than

62
63

Carey Young, “Works,” 2017, http://www.careyyoung.com/works.
Email to author, April 22, 2011.

196

Figure 4.6: CC Ironies (sample from a series of 42)

Vector graphics: Rob Myers, CC BY-SA, 2007197

partisan, or to be more precise, is inscribed in a copyright reformist trajectory where the choice of a license is not an innocent gesture. Similar
to the point I made earlier on the role of licensing as a form of artist statement, Myers argues that free culture licensing is a “small political act”,
that make artists and their work directly implicated in the Copyfight.64
Even though he generally finds the political commitments of artists to be“more often a cause of embarrassment than an interesting component of
the work”65 that causes the impairment of artistic freedom, he considers
Copyfight to be an exception because, and it is a paradox, he argues that
it is precisely inscribed in an effort to remove limits on artistic freedom.66
In that sense, the use of licensing in CC ironies is more than an artist
statement by Myers on free culture, it is also an attempt to communicate
to his fellow artists this particular reflexivity. He believes that free cultural licensing makes tangible and visible the underlying legal apparatus
of art production and distribution, and CC Ironies is thus a bold attempt
to demonstrate this point through practical means. Once again, there iswith such position an interesting split between a more partisan approach
to free culture, as illustrated by the examples of free-range free culture
practices discussed earlier, and the way artists like Myers understandtheses documents beyond their paratextual role. In fact, what triggered64

Copyfight is a blend word between copyright and fight, often used in free and open
source discussion as a general term to describe the struggle over intellectual property.
See Wendy Seltzer, “Why Open Source Needs Copyright Politics,” in Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution, ed. Chris DiBona, Mark Stone and Danese Cooper (2005;
repr., Sebastopole: O’Reilly, 2006), 150.
65
Rob Myers, “Why Should the Licence of an Artwork Be Interesting?” 2007, http://robmyers.org/2007/06/21/why-should-the-licence-of-an-artwork-be-interesting/.
66
Ibid.

198

Myers to first articulate the effect of licensing, and eventually produce
CC Ironies,67 was a comment on CC licensing from American artist duo
M.River & T.Whid Art Associates (MTAA), who while presenting themselves as CC license users, also wondered about the artificiality of suchlicenses which they qualified as a “legal-addon.”68 By artificiality Tim
Whidden from MTAA explains that it is “something added on by outside influence and may or may not have any meaning or value vis-a-vis
what the artist was trying to communicate in the art work,”69 and as consequence a CC licensed work is not necessarily better than a non CClicensed work because in his view, for most viewers the contextual shiftprovided by the CC license will not be perceived.70 According to Whidden, the value of a work will be appraised based on traditional artistic
criteria and not the license used. Worse, “drawing a viewer’s attention to
the licensing aspect of a work of art may confuse the viewer”71 . For Myers, these points are moot because there is no clear distinction between
understanding the work and understanding the artist’s intention once
there is copyfighting as political commitment. In his own words, CC licenses may not “make a work look better [but] it can make the work beseen better and can lead to the creation of better work.”72 They create

67

In June 2007, Myers first wrote about this aspect of licenses, and then made the work.
The latter was further developed in August of that year following the creation from
Bausola of a series of free culture licensed Free Gift Wrapping Paper inspired by thenotion of the gift economy. Email to author, January 13, 2011.
68
Tim Whidden, “Artificial Legal Add-Ons to Art,” 2007, http://www.mtaa.net/mtaaRR/
news/twhid/artificial_legal_add_ons_to_art.html.
69
Ibid.
70
Ibid.
71
Ibid.
72
Myers, “Why Should the Licence of an Artwork Be Interesting?”

199

a direct implication of the work and the artist with the issue of artistic
freedom. This argument implies however that the artist has been using
the license knowingly, a point I will discuss in the next chapter.

200

Interlude
With everything discussed so far in this text and more particularly in thissecond part, it should become clear that free culture is symptomatic ofa situation in which—in postmodernist terms—the temptation to present
it under the form of yet another grand narrative,1 “les grands récits,”2
is constantly challenged and questioned by its value and function at thelevel of individual experiences and personal narration. Similarly, the dual
openness of source code presented in the first chapter, and now the dual
openness of licenses, leads to a state where the technical, legal, and literary interpretation of these documents can never be taken for granted.
To make things even harder to track, as explained previously, proto-free
and free culture practices have greatly inherited from engineering prototyping culture, where things are constantly cooperatively rewritten,
revised, and reiterated. As for the question of authorship, a very broad
range of opinions can be found in these free cultural processes of partici-

1
2

In reference to Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition : A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Jean-François Lyotard, Rapport Sur Les Problèmes Du Savoir Dans Les Sociétés Industrielles Les Plus Développées (Québec: Conseil des universités, 1979).

201

pation. The way they are expressed in practice is directly aligned with themeans of reproduction that they offer to their audience: from traditionalverbatim strategies, so as to leave a thought or an intention pristine andpre-interpreted ready to be consumed by an audience, to an invariably replayed and materialised death of the author,3 whereby every reader has
the permission to become writer.
The direct consequence of this ongoing process is that it becomes questionable to find a foundation of discursivity4 in such mussiness. If I haveindeed shown that several stages of appropriation of free cultural principles imply their organisation around originative ideas, I must clarify
that this is different from describing a system of influence around a foundational idea. Instead it was merely used as a simple way of following
some of the transformation of the free cultural discourse as it is diffused.
To be sure, I do not see these transformations as proofs of defusion, orelements of deviance or divergence, that would imply the weakening or
recuperation of an authentic free and open foundational position. On thecontrary, each of these variations is given the possibility to become thefoundation of a new discourse, and as explained in Chapter 2, this should
not be seen as a problem, but a healthy sign of hegemonic and counterhegemonic dialogue in a very diverse cultural landscape,5 and operatingby the means of the expression of power relations via their conscious

345Barthes, Le Bruissement de La Langue, II. De l’œuvre au texte.
Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-Ce Qu’un Auteur? (Conférence 1969),” in Michel Foucault:
Dits et Écrits, 1954-1988. / Ii, 1976-1988, ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald and Jacques
Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001).
Chantal Mouffe, “Cultural Workers as Organic Intellectuals (2008),” in Chantal
Mouffe: Hegemony, Radical Democracy, and the Political, ed. James Martin (London:
Routledge, 2013), 210.

202

choice of inclusion and exclusion. Such practices help establish a certain
order in a context of contingency.6
The consequence again is that the license as the vector of a clearly
defined intention and usage simply cannot be trusted. The risk hereis that even if the freedom of interpretation and usage is beneficial forboth the cultural and legal fields, and can attest to the existence, if not tosome clichés, of a romantic understanding of the needs and apparatus ofeach side, this same freedom of interpretation can also quickly turn into
misunderstanding. In the thesis introduction I made reference to Halland Carey, to push forward the ideas of culture as communication andcommunication as culture, respectively. With free culture both these approaches seem to constantly work to simultaneously improve and undo
the outcome of the other, to the point where what we are left with could
be more accurately defined as culture as miscommunication and miscommunication as culture.
With that said, if it’s not a problem per se, it does not mean that it is
not problematic. The risk arises when a fixed viewpoint at a particulartime, becomes framed and turned illustrative of the whole machinery bymeans of hasty generalisations. Although it is not in the scope of thisresearch to systematically list all of these faulty generalisations, in thenext chapter I intend to provide an analysis of two aspects that are themost prone to misunderstandings: the meaning of copyleft within andoutside free culture; and the relationship between commercial activity

6

Mouffe, On the Political, 16–17.

203and free culture. Each point will be addressed with examples in its own
section.

204

Chapter 5
Free Cultural
Misunderstandings

5.1

The Double Misunderstanding with
Copyleft

On the 26th of May 2014 Italian noise musician Eleonora Oreggia, working under the artist name xname, published via email a call for experimental musical pieces on the theme of lullabies.1 The selected works weremeant to be released by the new net-label nebularosa, run by the artist,and distributed both as digital downloads and limited edition vinyl. Being both familiar with, and supportive of free culture practices2 and also

1
2

The following short account was narrated to me during an email exchange with Oreggia in 2015.
Eleonora Oreggia, “The Piksel Big Bang,” in FLOSS+Art, ed. Aymeric Mansoux and
Marloes de Valk (Poitiers: GOTO10, 2008).

205

a free software user for many years, Oreggia requested the applicantsto specify which license they wished their work to be published under.
However after making the final selection of works for the compilation, astrange pattern became apparent in the licensing choice. Indeed, insteadof specifying the name of a particular license, the majority of submitters
had simply put “copyleft”, which as discussed earlier in Chapter 1, is nota license but simply a property of some free culture licenses. But thestory does not stop here. After trying to clarify the situation with themusicians and explaining that a proper license was required, and that
copyleft per se was not a license, she eventually received the following
list of Creative Commons licenses from the artists: CC BY, CC BY-NC,
and CC BY-NC-ND. Perfect, these were indeed valid licenses, the project
could proceed as planned, except for one small puzzling fact: none ofthese licenses were copyleft licenses.3 How did that happen?
A circled backwards letter C, the vertical mirror of the copyright symbol, is the graphic representation of copyleft. It can be found today on
T-shirts, mugs, and of course on stickers to decorate the mood board that
represents the laptop cases of artists, designers, musicians, and writers
who want to demonstrate their support for… Well, for what precisely? As
explained in the first chapter, and in the context of free software, copyleft
is a property of a free software license, to ensure that all the modifications

3

As discussed previously, out of all the Creative Commons licenses, only the
CC BY-SA is close to a copyleft license. For a more detailed discussion on
the difference between copyleft and CC’s ShareAlike, see Rob Myers, “NonCommercial Sharealike Is Not Copyleft,” 2008, http://robmyers.org/2008/02/24/
noncommercial-sharealike-is-not-copyleft/.

206

and extensions made to the software must be free as well,4 meaning published and distributed under the same licensing terms. Copyleft is not asynonym of free software. Non-copyleft licenses, which can generally bedescribed as permissive licenses, do not require sharing back changes.5
In fact these permissive licenses are sometimes referred to as copyfree
licenses by their supporters, and the advocates of this term are openly
against copyleft, arguing that unlike copyleft, copyfree is true software
freedom because these licenses do not impose sharing.6 In practice, both
the FSF and OSI supports and list free software licenses that are copyleft
and copyfree, and open source licenses that are copyleft and copyfree,which should come as no surprise given the important overlap between
the two listings.
According to the FSF, the purpose of the copyleft mechanism is toprevent uncooperative7 people from converting free software into propri-

4
5

6
7

Free Software Foundation, “What Is Copyleft?” 2017, https://www.gnu.org/copyleft/
copyleft.html.
I am purposefully simplifying here to make the basic distinction more clear. In practice however, depending on the license, the copyleft principle can either be nonexistent, or weak, or strong. A license is said to be permissive, when the copyleft
principal is non existent and the licensed program can be turned into closed source
software. When a license is weakly protective, then the copyleft principle is said tobe weak, as the program is prevented from becoming closed source, yet it can become
part of a larger closed source system. Finally, when a license is strongly protective,then the copyleft principle is said to be strong, because the program is strictly prevented to become or be part of a larger closed source system. For a more complete
overview, See David A. Wheeler, “The Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) License Slide,” 2007, http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.pdf. Last but
not least, copyleft does not only apply to software, CC’s ShareAlike is roughly equivalent of copyleft, and free culture licenses can also be categorised by function of their
copyleft weight. See Contributors to the Freedom Defined Wiki, “Licenses,” 2014,
http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses.
Chad Perrin, Lester L. Martin II, Lisa Joy and Kbenjamin Sauerhaft Coplon, “Copyfree,” 2017, http://copyfree.org/.
Free Software Foundation, “What Is Copyleft?”207

etary software: copyleft is here to avoid a situation in which the freedom
granted by the author to the users of their software, has been strippedaway by an intermediary agent. As a consequence, in the case of the copyleft license GPL, it means that any distributed modifications of GPL’ed
software must in return also be licensed under the GPL itself, thereby
leading in theory to more free software being written and distributed.
This is why some critics of the free software movement started to use
the term viral licensing or virus8 to describe the possibility of the GPL
spreading whenever free software was modified and distributed. Someeven called it the “Borg property,”9 and there is certainly in these analogies a mix of popular sci-fi and posthumanist anxiety towards something
inhuman going out of control, stealing our identities, and taking over
the world. Here the notion of creativity is understood as a sort of Bergsonian élan vital,10 a precious biological reproductive function that needs
to be diligently safeguarded from a virus that might lead to involuntary
sharing of embodied private property and identity. The analogy is not
exaggerated and it seems these metaphorical strategies come up fairly
often during debates around IP, whether or not specific to copyleft andfree software. For instance in February 2012, following the peak of online
protest against the US bill Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the American

8

Raymond and Steele, “THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.2.1”; Paul Vixie, “Re: Section
5.2 (Ipr Encumberance) in Tak Rollover Requirement Draft. E-Mail to namedroppers
Mailing List,” March 6, 2006, http://web.archive.org/web/20070927175628/http://psg.
com/lists/namedroppers/namedroppers.2006/msg00246.html.
9Richard Hawkins, “The Economics of Open Source Software for a Competitive Firm,”
NETNOMICS 6, no. 2 (2006): 103–17.
10
In reference to Henri Bergson, L’évolution Créatrice. (Paris: Les Presses universitaires
de France, 1907).

208

film industry magazine The Hollywood Reporter solicited a branding andadvertising expert to draft a purposefully populist campaign targeting
piracy.11 The resulting mockup called DTCs, for Digitally Transmitted
Content, made a questionable parallel between viral sharing and STDs,
Sexually Transmitted Disease, using a condom as illustration and on the
packaging of which could be read in capital letters “PROTECT YOUR CREATIVITY.”12
To return to the puzzling situation of licensing choice made by themusicians of the nebularosa net-label, a question that I asked myself in
relation to this anecdote, was did the artists misunderstand what copyleft
is, or did I misunderstand what the artists meant by signing their workin such a way? I have shown that copyleft is indeed a very particular legal mechanism with no possible misunderstanding, and is emblematic ofsharing and co-creative practices. It is the most popular aspect of Stallman’s work, and plethora of free cultural copyleft licenses lists can befound on the Internet. Yet, the term is regularly misused. An example
of such a confusion can be seen in one of the scenes of the very popular
documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, in which copyleft is used to visually
represents several icons of non-copyleft Creative Commons licenses (Figure 5.1) such as non-commercial, sampling, and even public domain—thelatter being the most radically non-copyleft status a work can possibly
receive. Similarly the free software movement is frequently assimilated
to the so-called copyleft movement, and somehow put in relation with

11

THR, “The SOPA Disaster: Hollywood’s Image Problem and Who’s to Blame,” The
Hollywood Reporter 50 (2012): 34.
12
Ibid., 34.

209

Figure 5.1: RIP!: A Remix Manifesto

Still frame: Brett Gaylor, CC BY-NC 3.0, 2008210

art traditions of non- and anti-copyright practices.13 This creates confusion because copyleft relies heavily on copyright as explained several
times in this thesis, and also—as discussed in the previous chapter—when
it comes to mapping the different artistic intentions connected to cultural
freedom, there are irreconciable differences within the different communities which animate these fields.
The reason copyleft is misunderstood is very simple. The term sits atthe cross-road between the cultural field and the legal field. Copyleft, an
obvious play on the word copyright, is a way to express a certain formof rebellious and tongue-in-cheek humour which mocks or defies IP laws.
The term predates the FSF, and so a trivial symbol like a copyleft sticker
or the casual use of the term is not the sign of defusion and recuperationof free software by the means of mass producing stereotypes of culturalresistance, because such a sign occupied the cultural field long before
its legal articulation with free software. In fact, one day in 1984 Stallman received by mail a programming manual that had been borrowedby American hacker and computer artist Don Hopkins. On the envelope
a stickers reading “Copyleft (L)” was used to seal the small package. Hopkins had bought a pack of stickers at a science fiction convention, where
hackers, including Stallman, often gathered and where it was common
for them to organise and share rooms, notably for “@” parties in whichpeople with email addresses could meet each other.14 According to Hopkins, at that time the term copyleft was not part of the hacker culture, and13

See Liang, Guide to Open Content Licenses V1.2, The Black and White (and Grey) of
Copyright.
14
Email to author, February 17, 2015.

211

the stickers had been purchased in the dealer’s room of one convention
with other comics, political, and satirical stickers and buttons.15 Knowing
Stallman’s appreciation for such things, Hopkins had decorated the letterin a similar spirit. Little did he know that eventually the sticker and thepseudo-copyright statement he had written as a joke (Figure 5.2), would
inspire Stallman to use the word copyleft to describe the properties of theGPL.16 This is how copyleft, the symbol of rebellious cultural practices,
ended up being claimed as a term to describe a particular mechanism of
free software licensing. Regarding the copyleft term that inspired Stallman, it seems that it kept on being occasionnaly used in the nineties,
with no connection to free software. For instance, I found it mentionned
with the mark “<L>” instead of “(L)” in the lyrics of a filk song17 inspiredby the Dune science fiction saga by American author Frank Herbert. The
lyrics were signed “<L> 1992 by Jeremy Buhler” with a note at the end of
the file “PS - <L> means copyleft.”18
While Hopkins explained that copyleft was not part of the hacker culture at the time he bought the stickers, the overlap of different alternative, countercultural, niche, or underground communities was however already visible in the copyright notice of a 1976 implementationof the proto-free software Tiny BASIC, where could be read on the title screen “@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED.”19 This particular

15

Ibid.
Williams, Free as in Freedom, The GNU General Public License.
17
A folk derived participatory music genre linked to science-fiction and fantasy fan
communities as briefly discussed in Chapter 3.
18
Jeremy Buhler, “The Spice Has Made My Green Eyes Blue,” 1992, dune.txt.
19
Li-Chen Wang, “Palo Alto Tiny BASIC,” Dr. Dobb’s Journal 1, no. 5 (1976): 15.
16

212

line of copyleft linked to computational culture also kept on being active in the nineties with no apparent connection to free software. For
instance it can be found in some ezines mentionned as “(CL) Copyleft,”20
or “Copyleft 1992 - All Rites Reversed,”21 or “(CP) Kopyleft 1999 QNARKKPRODUCTIONS all rites reversed.”22 The last two are particularly interesting because they suddenly connect to much older publishing practices.
It was relatively common in the late sixties and seventies to spot in underground publication a statement against the publishing industry andintellectual property, in various forms, such as the phrase “All Rights Reversed”, spelled or expressed differently like in the “Ⓚ All Rites Reversed– reprint what you like” notice in the 1979 version of the Principia Discordia.23 Concerning the term copyleft itself, it is striking that mail artists
such as Ray Johnson also used the term copy-left in their work,24 and it
was possible on occasions to spot the now very popular copyleft icon, avertically mirrored copyright logo, marking a mail art related publication.
In this context copy-left was more politicised and articulated by those
who refused to engage with the art scene of the time, and who experimented with alternative systems of property by giving their art away, inan age were different strategies such as the staging of happenings, were

20

HTLV-3, ed., “020: The Swedish Elite Magazine. Nummer #1,” 1995, 020_1.txt.
Mister Zen, “Separation of Church and State in America: A Short History by Mister
Zen,” 1992, scsa-ash.txt.
22
Maje$ty, ed., “QNARKK. #4,” 1999, q04.txt.
23
Greg Hill, Principia Discordia, or, How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I
Found Her: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger, Wherein Is Explained Absolutely Everything Worth Knowing About Absolutely Anything. (Mason: Loompanics
Unlimited, 1979), SPECIAL AFTERWORD.
24
McKenzie Wark, “<nettime> from Mail Art to Net.art (Studies in Tactical Media #3),”
2002, http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0210/msg00040.html.
21

213

created to resist the commodification of culture. In particular the use ofcopy-left was seen by Japanese mail artist Ryosuke Cohen as a symbol of“free-from-copyright relationships”25 with other artists, in a way that was“not bound to ideologies.”26 Here the statement is not just paratextual,
it also refers to a practice and attitude towards particular communities
of sharing, similar to the 1973 “COPY-IT-RIGHT” and “distribution religion” philosophy from American video artist and activist Phil Morton,27or the earlier 1970 so-called Xerox mark, a circled X, used in the American video journal Radical Software, as the “antithesis of copyright”28 andto “encourage the dissemination of information”29 . Even though it is outof the scope of this research to map thoroughly other important or forgotten historical examples of copyright inversions, it should be clear thatthey have been quite numerous. The problem with such approaches, tocome back to the topic at hand, is that their legal validity is at best questionable, which makes it easy for them to be claimed by the intellectual
property framework they criticise. Unless potential artistic relationships
and cooperation are made explicit, which is what Lithuanian-American
artist George Maciunas did with fellow Fluxus artists by using a shared
copyright,30 or unless the estate of an artist or collective is taken over by a25

Ryosuke Cohen, “RYOSUKE COHEN MAIL ART - ENGLISH,” 1999, http://www.h5.
dion.ne.jp/~cohen/info/ryosukec.htm.
26
Ibid.
27
Jon Cates, “Re:Copying-IT-RIGHT AGAIN,” in Relive: Media Art Histories, ed. Sean
Cubitt and Paul Thomas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).
28
Phyllis Gershuny and Beryl Korot, eds., Radical Software, Volume 1, No. 1 (New York:
Raindance Corporation, 1970).
29
Ibid.
30
Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), GEORGE
MACIUNAS - Letter to Tomas Schmit (1964).

214Figure 5.2: Copyleft (L) sticker

Envelope scan: Don Hopkins, 1984, CC BY-SA 4.0

215

caring group or institution willing to document and share the work in thesame original spirit, like The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive,31
then the door to contradictions can open at any time. For instance, in avery unfortunate and sad twist, the copy-left free-from-copyright ethos
of mail-art echoed years later in some reproductions of Johnson’s copyleft works, which are now stamped “Copyright the estate of Ray Johnson.”32
But the copyleft trail does not stop there. The term copy-left and its
iconic representation were introduced onto the mail-art scene by Swiss
artist Manfred Vänçi Stirnemann, after the artist had sent stamps of the
copy-left word and logo to Cohen, who then started to use the latter to
imprint copy-left marks as part of his widely distributed stamp sheet editions.33 At the time Stirnemann was not aware of any similar usage ofthe term, and admits it is a quite obvious play on the word copyright, hewould not be surprised if other artists with some political inclination had
also come up with the same idea. At first, Stirnemann was not involvedin mail-art, and used copy-left and its mark for his projects and publications, such as the 1984 “copy-left” editions. His work has been inspiredby various topics and things, from the eighteenth century Encyclopédieedited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, early eighteenth
and nineteenth century anarchism and socialism, American poet Gary
Snyder and the Beat Generation, hippies, McLuhan’s global village, toart brut and the Frankfurt School. For Stirnemann, “no copy-right” eas-

31

Cates, “Re:Copying-IT-RIGHT AGAIN.”
Wark, “<nettime> from Mail Art to Net.art (Studies in Tactical Media #3).”
33
This paragraph is based on an email exchange with Stirnemann in March 2015.
32

216

Figure 5.3: Cover of 1985 copy-left issue #3

Photo: Aymeric Mansoux, 2011, CC0217

ily translates into copy-left while making allusion to left wing politics, it
is as simple as that. Regarding the coining and usage of the term, Stirnemann cites as first personal influence the Underground Press Syndicate(UPS), a late sixties born countercultural network of underground newspapers and publishers, within which community things were shared, withsimple rules of no copyright but the crediting of source and author. This
was actually often made explicit in these publications, for instance inthe colophon of the UPS affiliated underground magazine HOTCHA! initiated by Swiss artist and writer Urban Gwerder, the following statement
could be read: “anti-copyright aber quellenangabe und beleg erwünscht”,
anti-copyright but please cite the sources and references.34
Such an approach itself is of course in the trajectory, of the even moreradical pseudo-copyright statement found in the Internationale Situationniste publication, which started with its third issue of 1959 to print thefollowing notice: “Tous les textes publiés dans ‘INTERNATIONALE SITUATIONISTE’ peuvent être librement reproduits, traduits ou adaptés,même sans indication d’origine.”35 All the texts published in ‘INTERNATIONALE SITUATIONISTE’ can be freely copied, translated or altered,even without mention of origin. The link could be further explored totake into accounts the large history of anti-copyright and plagiarist practices in art,36 but it is not necessary. The demonstration here, is to simply
show that copyleft licenses are not derived and do not belong to the cul-

34

Urban Gwerder, ed., HOTCHA!, No. 49 (Zürich: UPS, 1970).
Guy Debord, ed., Internationale Situationniste (Numéro 3) (Les Sections del’Internationale Situationniste, 1959), 2.
36
Cramer, “Anti-Copyright in Artistic Subcultures.”

35

218

tural legacy of anti copyright practices. They are completely different
trajectories. It would be more correct to say that it just happens that
Stallman was exposed unknowingly to the micro-mediatic37 diffusion ofunderground art scenes with the copyleft sticker, and ended up fixatinga term outside of its original context. This of course helped a lot free
software to become adopted and appropriated back by artists who thereafter, with very few exceptions such as Copyleft Attitude, did not interpret copyleft in its techno-legal context but linked it to an internalised
symbolic critique of the culture industry in the past century.
American scholar James O. Young suggests using the term style appropriation when “artists do not reproduce works produced by anotherculture, but still take something from that culture [and] produce works
with stylistic elements in common with the works of another culture.”38
In that sense, the artists contributing to Oreggia’s netlabel sampler effectively appropriate the style of free software culture by using the term
copyleft in relation to the licensing of their work, yet picking the apparently wrong non-copyleft licenses. Similarly, the *.copyleft!_* notice from
Turkish artist İbrahim O. Akıncı, both refers to the notions of free art,
copyleft attitude, and free culture, yet presents itself as a non-license, acomment on the moral values and ethics of free culture, as they are perceived by the artist.39 But Stallman’s use of copyleft is also a case of style37

In reference to Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital(Hanover: University Press of New England, 1996), “Micro-Media: Flyers, Listings,
Fanzines, Pirates”.
38
James O. Young, Cultural Appropriation and the Arts (2008; repr., Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2010), 6.
39İbrahim O. Akıncı, “httpdot.net » . .copyleft!_:” 2013, http://www.httpdot.net/
copyleft_.

219

appropriation of underground and countercultural practices, for which
the meaning of copyleft is not universal, but as I have shown, points to acollection of intentions and processes that can vary greatly, from encouraging copying, but not specifying the possibilities of transformation, or
requesting attribution, to complete permissiveness and the occasional legal limbo to provoke a challenge to copyright. They are all unique andspecific to the cultural context they stem from. These practices were infact not proto-copyleft but similar to the proto-free culture era describedin Chapter 2, where all sorts of exotic licenses were used to publish digital works. Therefore, and returning to the netlabel anecdote, it becomesunderstandable that when asked to specify a license, the musicians allcome with very different licenses, each illustrative of a personal understanding of copyleft art that interfaces with common language, as part ofan ongoing dramatisation40 of the processes of cultural commodification.
So in the end there are truly two misunderstandings occuring with theuse of free software derived copyleft for works of art: the first is mostobviously the failure to properly use free cultural copyleft licenses, but
the second, more subtle underhand misunderstanding, and of equal if not
more importance, is the failure to see behind the first one the continuation of poetics and resistance, as part of a long history of practices criticalof intellectual property.

40

In reference to Hebdige, Subculture, 87.

220

5.2

The Enduring Debate over the Commercial
Exploitation of Free Culture

Another frequent source of confusion is the commercial exploitation offree and open things, and the muddiness surrounding the topic seems tobe the most persistent misunderstanding within free culture. Because ofthis, the literature on the topic has yielded in the past, and is still producing a plethora of contradictory analysis. For instance open source waspresented early on as exemplary of a cyber-communist gift economy andwrongly associated with the shareware and freeware business models,41
or articulated as anti-commercial effort,42 that sometimes was even described as the underlying meaning of copyleft.43 It is an old confusion
and more recent writings have started to look back at the connection between free software and the software industry in a less one-sided way,44
providing in particular a much needed articulation of the relationship between the liberal interpretation of free software and free markets, and thetension that arises in the symbiosis between capital and community.45
Still, even today the relationship between free and open source
software, and its commercial exploitation from large corporations to

41

Richard Barbrook, “The Hi-Tech Gift Economy,” First Monday 3, no. 17 (1998), http://
firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/631/552; Richard Barbrook, “The HiTech Gift Economy,” First Monday Special Issue 3 (2005), http://firstmonday.org/
article/viewArticle/1517/1432, Special Issue Update.
42
Galloway, Protocol, 169–71.
43
Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 301–2.
44
Berry, Copy, Rip, Burn, The Commercialisation of FLOSS.
45
Johan Söderberg, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement(New York: Routledge, 2008), Business models based on free software.

221

garage-hacker startup companies, is the topic of heated debate.46 It istrue that the link between commercial practices, software distribution,and the idea of selling software has always been a complicated construction within free and open source communities. Swedish scholar Johan
Söderberg uses the 1989 slogan from early free software supporting
company Cygnus Solutions, “we make free software affordable,”47 tosum up the contradictory logic of the first commercial exploitations offree software practices. But this ambiguity is also mirrored, early on in
the nineties, with the discourse of the first large non-commercial andnot-for-profit free software projects. For American software engineer
Ian Murdock, founder of the free software Debian project and operating
system, software freedom in relation to commercial exploitation wasreferred in such a way:

The Free Software Foundation plays an extremely important role in
the future of Debian. By the simple fact that they will be distributing
it, a message is sent to the world that Linux is not a commercial
product and that it never should be, but that this does not meanthat Linux will never be able to compete commercially. For those of
you who disagree, I challenge you to rationalize the success of GNU
Emacs and GCC, which are not commercial software but which have
had quite an impact on the commercial market regardless of thatfact.48

The idea of something presented as non-commercial, which nonethe-46

For instance on popular tech news posting and discussion forums, such as Slashdot,
Hacker News, and also some subreddits from Reddit and various chan’s /g/ and /tech/boards, such debates have solicited emblematic knee-jerk reactions from its community of users, whenever something related to free and open source software andcommercial exploitation is discussed.
47
Ibid., 32.
48
Murdock, “The Debian Manifesto.”222

less has the ability to be commercially competitive on a market, is nottrivial to communicate and understand, but it makes explicit that theresistance towards commercial exploitation is not necessarily an opposition to the principles of free market. Fast forwarding fifteen years after the release of the Debian manifesto from which the above text wasquoted, this ambiguity has played in favour of developing a large free
and open source software supported anti-capitalist network infrastructure,49 but also fuelled many large scale free and open source software
based commercial projects. The latter is obvious for products relying on
permissive licensing, as often exemplified by the relationship between
FreeBSD and Mac OS,50 but also for copyleft licensing for which commercial exploitation is possible in spite of the much feared source code
closedness. This strategy was particularly demonstrated with Google’s
Android mobile operating which Linux source code, was essentially reduced to an open middleware and thin client, meant to interface with acorporate controlled closed ecosystem of apps and cloud services.51
As covered in the first chapter, since its infancy, the FSF goal was neverto promote the distribution of software free of charge, but instead to liberate the software culture from the closed source and proprietary softwaremodel. Even before the introduction of the term open source, Stallman

49

For a list of 32 active, at the time of writing, of “[a]nti-capitalist, anti-hierarchy, autonomous revolutionary collectives which provide free or mutual aid services to radical and grassroots activists”, see Riseup, “Radical Servers,” 2017, https://riseup.net/
en/security/resources/radical-servers.
50
Weber, The Success of Open Source, 202.
51
Kimberley Spreeuwenberg and Thomas Poell, “Android and the Political Economy of the Mobile Internet: A Renewal of Open Source Critique,” First Monday
17, no. 7 (2012), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/
view/4050/3271.

223

was very well aware of the risk of using the adjective free:

The word “free” in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it toyour neighbours, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, thefreedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead ofit controlling you.52

However, this was only the beginning of what would be an unceasing
struggle with language. Not only did the FSF supporters have to liberate
software to fit their particular definition of freedom, now they would alsoneed to do the same for their own vocabulary. Therefore, by the end of
the nineties, and shortly before the creation of the OSI, the FSF started
to maintain a collection of “confusing or loaded words and phrases thatare worth avoiding.”53 This effort is in fact a preemptive lexicon meant
to defuse possible current and future weaknesses in the free software discourse. The evolution of this collection of definitions is literally an everchanging media archaeological artefact that is the witness of Stallman’s
learning process and own individuation, which development, like GNU’s
source code, is made public through an iterative and version controlled
workflow.
Throughout the years, the list has kept on growing, as an attempt topatch any new misunderstanding, and to remain in control of the GNU
language. Regarding the issue of the commercial exploitation of free and52
53

Stallman, “What Is the Free Software Foundation?”
Free Software Foundation, “Confusing Words and Phrases That Are Worth
Avoiding,” 1998, http://web.archive.org/web/19980119061527/http://www.fsf.org/
philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.

224

open source software, this lexicon is therefore helpful in its function of
logging Stallman’s defusing efforts. For instance, the entry “Sell software” added in 1998, is essentially a response to the threat presented by
the creation of the OSI the same year:“Sell software”
The term “sell software” is ambiguous. Strictly speaking, exchanging a copy of a free program for a sum of money is “selling”; but people usually associate the term “sell” with proprietary restrictions on
the subsequent use of the software. You can be more precise, andprevent confusion, by saying either “distributing copies of a program for a fee” or “imposing proprietary restrictions on the use ofa program,” depending on what you mean.54

In this quote, Stallman and the FSF try to balance an ethically driven
free software discourse with a touch of openness towards commercial
exploitation. This attempt to connect with past defectors and future OSI
supporters is even stronger fours years later, were the term “commercial”
is added in response to the increasing popularity of the term open sourcein business contexts:“Commercial”
Please don’t use “commercial” as a synonym for “non-free”. That
confuses two entirely different issues.
A program is commercial if it is developed as a business activity.
A commercial program can be free or non-free, depending on its
license. Likewise, a program developed by a school or an individual
can be free or non-free, depending on its license. The two questions,what sort of entity developed the program and what freedom its
users have, are independent.

54

Ibid.

225

In the first decade of the Free Software Movement, free software
packages were almost always noncommercial; the components of
the GNU/Linux operating system were developed by individuals or
by non-profit organisations such as the FSF and universities. But inthe 90s, free commercial software started to appear.
Free commercial software is a contribution to our community, so
we should encourage it. But people who think that “commercial”
means “non-free” are likely to assume the idea is self-contradictory,
and reject it based on a misunderstanding. Let’s be careful not to
use the word “commercial” in that way55

This long quote is particularly striking because it shows two aspectsof the free software discourse prototyping. First, Stallman starts to reachthe limits of its conceptual framework, and the more he tries to articulate
a neutral all encompassing position the more difficult it becomes for thereader. If the usage of free in free software was already confusing andquestionable,56 the introduction of a term like free commercial software,
while perfectly correct and coherent within the GNU language, does little
to help communicate that free software and commercial exploitation arecompatible. Kelty uses the term recursive public to describe how the free
software community articulates itself via direct engagement and modification,57 but what the FSF and Stallman’s collection of problematic words
shows is that the procedure in which such recursion happens, while being

55

Free Software Foundation, “Confusing Words and Phrases That Are Worth
Avoiding,” 2002, http://web.archive.org/web/20020124230207/http://www.fsf.org/
philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.
56
Every now and then, some debates sprout online which discuss whether or not theterm is ambiguous and should be renamed. Usually the alternatives suggested areso tainted with a personal interpretation of freedom, that trying to clarify leads toeven more problematic alternatives, for instance “Freedom Software”, or “People’s
Software”, or “Software for the Masses”. See Sandip Bhattacharya, “Re: Free Software [ Solutions [was So what is the problem?],” 2004, http://git.net/ml/org.fsf.india.
fsf-friends/2004-09/msg00045.html
57
Kelty, Two Bits, Introduction.

226

public and informed by public discussions, is in fact private and authoritative. It is also more recursive than Kelty may have wished for as it gives
little room for a change of direction, because its self-similar generative
process only points to a downward spiral. The text quoted above is also
symptomatic of an information driven culture that constantly rewrites
its own history. In particular, the entry quoted above significantly alters
the commercial origins of free software as it omits the fact that Stallman’sefforts to develop the concept of free software was bootstrapped by the
selling of his own free software,58 or to be more precise, by distributing
copies of proto-GNU programs for a fee. Regardless, this novel practicewould indeed prove to be an “innovative business model,”59 which makes
the emergence of open source software a logical next step in the refinement of such commercial practices.
If free software is truly a recursive public, then its base case is thefamous expression “free as in speech, not as in beer,”60 which has the
specificity to link the free software discourse with broader free culturalissues, but also doom the latter by transmitting further its ambiguity to
non-software free cultural things. This aspect was notably highlighted
with the 2005 free beer project.61 This brew was initiated by a group58

See Richard M. Stallman, “The Gnu Operating System and the Free Software Movement,” in Open Sources: Voices of the Open Source Revolution, ed. Chris DiBona,Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone (Sebastopol: O’Reilly; Associates, 1999), 53–70, GNU
Emacs.
59
Salus, The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin, 50.
60
Originally formulated in 1998 as such: “ ‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, notprice. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free speech’, not ‘free beer’ ”.
See Stallman, “What Is Free Software?” 1998. The modern version was introduced
in 2001. See Stallman, “What Is Free Software?” 2001.
61
SUPERFLEX, “FREE BEER,” 2004, http://superflex.net/tools/free_beer.

227

of students from the IT-University in Copenhagen and the Danish artist
collective SUPERFLEX. It was first released under the name Vores Øl 62 ,the open source beer, and was later modified and developed further by
the artist collective as the Free Beer project. What is specific about thisbeer is that the recipe and the branding are published under a CC BY-SA
license that allows anyone to produce the same beverage, or any otherone that would be derived from this freely available recipe. Similar to thefree software copyleft principle, this is made possible as long as the termsof the CC license are respected. The conditions boils down to publish theoriginal or modified recipe with the same license and requires credits tothe project initiators, and other contributors if the recipe has already been
modified. As long as this condition is respected, anyone is free to makeand sell the free beer product and earn money with it, without having to
pay any royalties or licensing fees to the authors of the original recipe, orto those who modified it further. But, next to the playfulness of the work,
what such a project shows is the fragility of the FSF position towards
the expression of selling software. Free Beer is a free cultural work, andmore precisely a beer liberated from the closed and sometimes secretive
practices of brewers, but it’s also a product of consumption that is sold in
different contexts, and for which it would be rather strange to rephrase
the selling of free beers in favour of the distribution of free beers for afee.
So in practice, the confusion discussed here, when transposed at a62

Superflex.net and students at ITU.dk, “Vores øl,” 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/
20041224002116/http://www.voresoel.dk/main.php?id=5.

228

non-software free cultural level, has multiple repercussions, on economic
profit, cultural commentary, and consumerism. First it’s the open door
for crude and direct exploitation because free culture can present itself
as a gift economy,63 in which money is not the purpose of the exchangeof goods or services, which is more or less implied by Stallman’s effort
to avoid using the word selling. The consequence is that for instancewhen the CC supporter and image hosting website Flickr attempted tomonetise the photos of its users,64 it offered a classic licensing model toremunerate the photographers who had chosen to publish their photos
under standard copyright protection, but did not offer any compensation
to those who had publish their photos under the CC licenses that were
not explicitly non commercial. Nothing wrong from a legal perspective
but a rather painful reality check for the photographers using CC licenses
who had not quite understood some of the subtleties of this pseudo-gift
economy. Second, the confusion exists also on the other side of the freecultural transaction, which seriously weakens the paratextual message
shared by free culture supporters. For instance free culture supporting
scholars such as Cramer, or animators like Paley, are almost systematically asked by editors, publishers and distributors to approve, license,
authorise, and make contracts copies of their work for publications or
screening,65 despite their use of free culture licenses, thus ignoring and63

Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1954;
repr., London: Routledge, 2002).
64
Richard Nieva, “Some Photographers Bristle over Flickr’s Selling of Photos,” CNET,\url{https://www.cnet.com/news/some-photographers-bristle-over-flickrs2014,selling-of-photos/}.
65
Emails to, and in discussion with author, 2013-2014.

229

making irrelevent the point they try to make to the very culture industry that remains blissfully unaware or unwilling to engage with such critiques. And third, from the perspective of the consumer, the default interpretation of free in the context of exchange and sharing, simply means
gratis.
Of course, those expecting free software to be free as in free beer, or
believing that it is the outcome of a spontaneous global cooperative mechanism are very much misinformed about how such software is produced.
The vast majority of Linux kernel developers are employed by tech companies66 which have extended their competition in the writing of sourcecode relevant for their product, and many important desktop and mobile applications and their components are managed and produced bylarge corporations, following a model in which free and open source software is used strategically.67 Similarly, emblematic projects like Mozilla
Firefox are still alive simply because of external revenue streams anddeals,68 made possible via a construction in which the very communicative nonprofit organisation controls a more discreet revenue-generating
entity.69 At the opposite end, small or independent software projects constantly struggle to generate income for its developers, even if their work66

See Corbet and Kroah-Hartman, “Linux Kernel Development.”
Salman Q. Mian, Jose Teixeira and Eija Koskivaara, “Open-Source Software Implications in the Competitive Mobile Platforms Market,” I3E 2011: Building the E-World
Ecosystem, 2011, 110–28; Jose Teixeira and Tingting Lin, “Collaboration in the OpenSource Arena: The Webkit Case,” SIGSIM-CPR ’14 Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Conference on Computers and People Research, 2014, 121–29.
68
Essentially royalties from deals with search engine companies, see Hood & Strong,“Independent Auditor’s Report and Consolidated Financial Statements,” Financial report (Mozilla Foundation and Subsidiary, 2015).
69
See Mozilla Foundation, “Mozilla Foundation Reorganization,” 2005, http://
www-archive.mozilla.org/reorganization/.
67

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is widely used commercially,70 sometimes with their economic struggle
noticed only once covered in tech news channel.71 Yes, free software licenses allow for commercial exploitation and most free and open source
software source code is nowadays just one click away to download for
free, but abuses from corporations and the reluctance of the FSF to engage seriously with the question of work and labour, combined with very
optimistic views on a fully cooperative society and sharing economy living on thin air, all this has today severely damaged the cultural diversity
within the free and open source software ecosystem. As a result, in practice free software is expected to be gratis, available on-demand, disposable, and coming out of nowhere but the cloud. Worse still, this aspect isoften given as an advantage of free and open source software over closed
source and proprietary software. Any independent developer or small
team of programmers trying to make a user pay for their work—or trying to justify the need to make a living—will in the best case provide aminimal income,72 or in the worst case be trashed publicly for daring to
ask for money.73
If the FSF can greatly help with intellectual property issues and abuseregarding free and open source software, it is neither a union, nor a co-70

Bob Beck, “Re: Request for Funding Our Electricity,” 2014, https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138972987203440&w=2.
71
Julia Angwin, “The World’s Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy,
Who Is Going Broke,” ProPublica, 2015, https://www.propublica.org/article/
the-worlds-email-encryption-software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke.
72
Paul Davis, “Ardour and Money, 2014 Edition,” 2014, https://community.ardour.org/
node/8288.
73
Reddit Linux, “‘You Are a Cheater If You Download Elementryos for Free’,” 2015,
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2vi6qo/you_are_a_cheater_if_you_
download_elementryos_for/?st=iyvr87to&sh=0d2f6594.

231

operative. Free and open source software programmers are on their own
trying to find ways to survive until the day when Stallman’s free society
comes true, a society where “nobody will have to work very hard just to
make a living” and “[t]here will be no need to be able to make a livingfrom programming.”74 But that proposition also ends up sabotaging thefurther development of free and open source software, and today results
in a situation where for some, public source code has became a way toshow off skills, to present source code as a curriculum vitae to eventually
get hired and paid to write software that will unlikely be free software,a trend accelerated by so-called social coding platforms like GitHub,75
but also by the same boards, like the social news website Hacker News,76
where such practices are discussed and where it is well accepted to show
pet projects.77 These demos are often personal projects, highly topicaland personal, or dependant on external services and platforms, and forwhich user attraction and software rot is irrelevant because they are software of the moment. Such software is a disposable material to gain reputation and visibility within the startup software industry.
For non software free cultural works and expressions however, thistranslation does not work well, as—with the exception of performing a

74

Stallman, “The GNU Manifesto.”
Laura Dabbish, Colleen Stuart, Jason Tsay and Jim Herbsleb, “Social Coding in
Github: Transparency and Collaboration in an Open Software Repository,” Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2012,
1277–86; Daniel Doubrovkine, “Github Is Your New Resume,” 2011, http://code.
dblock.org/2011/07/14/github-is-your-new-resume.html.
76
Notably the “Show HN:” threads. See Y Combinator, “Show | Hacker News,” 2017,https://news.ycombinator.com/show.
77
Laura Dabbish, Colleen Stuart, Jason Tsay and Jim Herbsleb, “Social Coding in
Github.”75

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work—most artistic income streams rely on making derived objects fromthe work, or licensing its access.78 What is more, unlike software tools,
with a few exceptional cases where the tool itself becomes a culturally
infused constraint practice associated with a specific community and culture,79 the value of these works or expressions do not age the same: by
effect of fashion, discovery, trends, inspiration, these works can become
financially relevant at any time. To distribute them both for free and witha free software licenses is therefore truly radical, because of the financial
suicide it may represents.
As a workaround, partisan or free culture often adopts a liberal communist discourse in which the role of services is presented as a requirement
for sustainability: the musician does not make money from the music
freely licensed but from merchandising, gigs, limited physical editions or
the free tracks on cassette tapes and vinyls; the writer derives income
from special physical limited editions of an electronic publication; theartist does not make money from commercial gallery purchases and exhibitions but from public funding, residencies, and commissions. All ofthese strategies come with strings attached given the mediation createdby the production and distribution of these new objects, in which the freeculture freedom of the author is moderated by the editorial freedom of
the platforms, the publishers, the funding organisations, and the curators
standing at the gates of a liberated culture as service driven economy.

78

It is out of the scope of this thesis to discuss alternative and speculative models forfree culture production, crowd-funding and other patronnage. For some case studies,see “Sustainable Models for Shared Culture.”.
79
For instance ASCII and ANSI editors.

233

On top of that, novel forms of funding and micro-payments or patronage can be put in place, but are so far only effective for already established authors, or very talented marketers and net-workers, or targetedat mainstream culture consumption. Finally, for free culture artists who
were not born wealthy, working today still remains the most straightforward option to liberate a practice and bypass entirely the ambiguity of thecommercial exploitation of free culture, thus coinciding with economic
models of anti-professional art production that pre-date free culture80 andalso connect back with strategies to sustain the making of work that resist
commodification, either because of their form or because of the intentionof their author.

80

Stiles and Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, GEORGE MACIUNAS- Letter to Tomas Schmit (1964).

234

Part 3: Free as in … Trapped235

In the second part of the dissertation, I wanted to build upon thediscussion started earlier in Part 1, about the consequences of the verybroad adoption of what I called the free software template. I had alreadysketched that the introduction of the latter had led to a very wide adoption beyond the software realm, and hinted that this adoption should
not be misunderstood for a global movement, but instead somethingcloser to a self-contained liberal democratic process with many opinions
driven sometimes by radically opposed ideologies.
To make this aspect more clear I have looked in the last three chaptersat the cultural appropriation of the free software template in the context
of art and culture production. I have shown that unlike what was perceived at the legal level—namely seeing free and open source licensing
as a convenient novelty mechanism to make collaborative works—the motivation behind such appropriation was much more profound. I have explained that it would be more precise, in fact, to talk about the plurality of
appropriations, and inspirations, because of the different intentions that
motivated them in the first place. To explain this aspect I have notably
discussed that next to the early emergence of free and open content, theproto-free cultural concept of art libre, or free art, had existed as two different strands that neither overlapped, nor sought convergence. At thesame time their existence posed the problem of affiliation with free software, in which the hypothesis of a liberated work of art is problematised
differently and shows a different appreciation of cultural freedom, thus
weakening a free culture discourse presented as a common umbrella forall software and non-software freedom. But if there has been cultural appropriation and if some elements have been lost or transformed in transla236

tion, I have also shown that the communities that emerged around theseprinciples are not based on make-believe relations but genuine and concrete practices, regardless if they are rooted in a magical recovery1 ofa lost or purely speculative tradition. They simply materialise cultural
freedom in different ways.
As announced in the text of the GPL—almost in a prophetic warning to
the coming free culture practices—a GPL licensed work is provided “ ‘AS
IS’ WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED ORIMPLIED.”2 Pushing this disclaimer further, there is absolutely no guarantee that works created within free culture are ideologically aligned or
can form a coherent whole. This is not without consequences on artistic productions, not just because of their failure to contribute to usefulcommons in an engineered culture industry made of Lego bricks, but also
in terms of their effectiveness to communicate a critique of intellectual
property, if such critique limits itself to the selection of tools or licenses.
Even for an artist like Mattin interviewed in Chapter 4—who told methat he did not believe that a work should be totally transparent and all
encompassing, and who considered his work a purposefully fragmented
puzzle that should just give enough clues and tension to trigger curiosity and discussion on that matter—it is questionable if putting back sucha puzzle is even possible. Understanding the context of the productionof free cultural works is therefore an haphazard process, as it really depends on several levels of literacy. I have explained that this literacy

12

Clarke, “The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of the Community.”
Free Software Foundation, “GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2,” 1991.

237

issue is also to be taken into account from the perspective of the practitioners themselves. Practitioners can pick up the wrong license for theirwork, misuse it, or misunderstand why it was created in the first place.
This situation is of course ignored by those who act as a gateway to alternative copyright licensing, and the reasons of such bypass are twofold.
First of all, as discussed in Chapter 2, the different definitions that haveattempted to vulgarise the notion of cultural freedom and open content,
form their own habitus which overshadows that from which the licenses
they select stem. Secondly, whenever a new generalised strategy for alternative copyright licensing is proposed, it is systematically reduced toits legal analysis, not only because those who are producing such synthesis are very often legal scholars, but also because it is much easier tocompare licenses from the lingua franca of the law, rather than from alanguage-game perspective, let alone aesthetics.
Walter Benjamin in his time noted that the increased popularity ofphotography from its adoption of Dada inspired revolutionary content in
the political photo-montages of John Heartfield, eventually turned intoa more nuanced aesthetic experience, that ultimately led to the successof “transforming even abject poverty – by apprehending it in a fashionably perfected manner – into an object of enjoyment.”3 To paraphrase
Benjamin, the practitioners misusing the copyleft principles could for
instance run the risk of ending up supplying, once again, a productive
apparatus without changing it. This problem is clearly visible with theinfantilisation of authors that happens, for instance, with the Creative

3

Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 87.

238Commons plea for human readable deeds, while keeping content producers away from the more adult texts such as the lawyer-readable texts
and the technological information that constitutes the machine-readable
metadata. Discussions surrounding intellectual property must be led by
specialists. Berry and Moss, borrowing terminology from Deleuze, notedthat CC “licensing model acts as a ‘plan(e) of organisation’, placing a grid
over culture, communication and creativity” while ensuring that “legal
licences and lawyers remain key nodal and obligatory passage points.”4This aspect is also felt by free artists themselves. I have explained that
free art worked as a safe haven, an autonomous territory for specific artistic practices, but this territory is also claimed at a higher level by myriad
forms of federating structures and alliances. For instance, with the FAL
becoming an official free culture approved licence, and more recently
with the compatibility with the latest iteration of the CC BY-SA license:5
art libre becomes hardly dissociable from free culture and CC. It ends
up being used by practitioners who are not familiar with the context inwhich the FAL was created, and will likely miss the critique of Moreau,
who warns against a free culture turning into an end in itself, and nolonger as a means by which to liberate authors and their work.6
However, in a surprising and hopeful twist, I have argued that this is
not necessarily an issue, because, as I have shown in the previous part,4

5
6

See David M. Berry and Giles Moss, “The Politics of the Libre Commons,” First
Monday 11, no. 9 (2006), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1403/
1321.
Creative Commons, “ShareAlike Compatibility.”
Moreau, “Le Copyleft Appliqué à La Création Hors Logiciel. Une Reformulation Des
Données Culturelles ?” 565.

239

when it boils down to groups or individual practices, the materialisationof free culture happens with very open interpretations, which are consistent with artistic styles and cultural identity. Rather than following
closely a free cultural constitution or binding to a specific federating ideology, I have given as examples the use of the word copyleft, and thecommercial exploitation of free culture to illustrate how these aspects
change from one group, or individual, to another. In particular, a lot of
the cultural affiliation that can be found in free culture analysis is essentially coincidental, or accidental, and when examined closely that which
at first seemed to be the development of the same ideas, was in fact anarbitrary linguistic crossover of two different trajectories. This is why I
have argued that the cultural diffusion of software freedom happens indifferent stages, showing the existence of more authoritative centres, that
preserve and develop the definitions and rules in order to remain in control of their free cultural discourse. But at the same time this discourse
is also counter-shaped by the communities, and also by the individuals
that revolve around these centres, and for which the understanding of all
the free and open source ideas can be radically different.
In sum, free culture is animated by two forces that keep on trying to
get a hold of each other. One more conscious of its agenda is the freeculture, which locks itself out from public debate by constantly trying toprevent its participants from radically reconfiguring its structure. This
force embraces openness as long as the openness of interpretation andmeaning of its discourse is untouched and unquestioned. The other force,more chaotic and spontaneous, is the uncontrolled and unforeseen interpretation of such discourse, and the way the constitutive free software240

template is used in practice, how free software is produced regardless of
its usefulness, how free cultural licenses are deployed with little regard totheir cultural context, how the rational dimension of the free cultural machine ends up injected, maybe involuntarily sabotaged, with works andunderstanding driven by other motives.
In this final part of the thesis, it is now time to analyse more closely
such machinery, and why this apparently conflictual and inefficient interaction is the main drive that has kept free culture afloat so far. Until
now, I have focussed on the historical lineage of free culture that saw thebirth, decay, and sometimes death, of many definitions and licenses. I
have also highlighted that the motives and intentions of those using freeculture licenses, and free and open source software, can deviate considerably. I have also shown how licenses can act as a surrogate for artist’s
statements, and by extension are truly a ready-made paratextual statement, and how these texts instruct rules that can enable powerful andcritical collaborative cultural frameworks, yet for which in some cases
the licensing rationalisation seems fragile, and could in fact reinforce thenotions of markets, property, and authorship, that the licensee thought
to initially challenge by adopting alternatives to default copyright mechanisms. Given this chaos of openness and freedom, I started to wonder
how it is possible for free culture not to implode or collapse under all thedifferent systems of beliefs it allows, and how this multi-faceted systemmanages to produce anything when its foundation seem to be built by
diverging forces, and near constant miscommunication. To explain why,against all odds, free and open source principles are today still inspiring new variations and keep on reinventing their affiliation, I argue that241

these free and open things sustain themselves, precisely because they are
postponing their failure, over and over again, by the means of conflicts
and tensions that provide new opportunities for its participants to learn
to think and ask their own questions, opposing singular and local views
with general and consensual ones,7 as discussed previously in Chapter 2
during the transition between less defined proto-free and more defined
free culture practices.
In this third and final part of the thesis I am therefore focus on thisparticular generative mechanism that copyright and intellectual property laws, the media and software industries, and of course the Internet,
have bootstrapped in the neighbourhood of, and within free culture itself. Here I am giving evidence that clues regarding the resilience andgrowth of the free culture ecosystem can be found by looking right into
the source of its apparent contradictions and points of friction. For thisfinal demonstration I need to depart from and, at the same time, rely
on previous analysis of aspects of free culture that have already highlighted some of its properties. There has been three decades of writingon free and open source software, and more recently free culture, whichhave all more or less precisely tackled many different aspects of thesethings, but have done so always in isolation or ignorance of the others.
For instance, depending how one is looking at free and open source software, it could be framed as free labour in the context of participatory,

7

Here I am referring to and paraphrasing remarks from Belgian philosopher Isabelle
Stengers on the question of taking position and capabilities that is institutionally removed from the public, or at best impaired and limited to ready-made non conflictualissues. See Stengers, Au Temps Des Catastrophes, 165–76.

242

yet commercially driven, fully or partially open source products,8 or on
the contrary it could be given an egalitarian and positive role to develop
anarchist models of production in the network society.9 These narrow
views have led to the drawing of radically opposed conclusions and speculations, and it is my desire with this last part to depart from these single
specific forms of analysis, and instead draft a model in which all these oppositions, contradictions, and possible misunderstandings are given an
essential role.
Ultimately, I argue that conflict, unlike the way it is often perceived,10
should not be seen as an agent against cooperation which requires mediation, but as the unseen glue that prevents these free and open cooperative modes from falling apart. Here my analysis aims to stand against
the narrative of equal representation and transparency, and more precisely, the semantics wars in proto- and defined free culture are therefore
not wasteful efforts to defend one’s territory in the name of a locallydefined freedom and openness, against another locally-defined freedom
and openness.11 Far from being apolitical, they implement politics asa messy assembly of dissembling,12 which is not fuelled but very muchthreatened by any endeavour to turn these things into a cohesive and8

See Terranova, “Free Labor.”
Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant.”
10
Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan, CHAPTER 5: Why Don’t We Sit Down and
Talk About It?
11
With locally-defined, I mean to say definitions of cultural freedom that are only specific to a limited group, project, or context, and that cannot be generalised outside ofthese.
12
Here I make reference to Bruno Latour’s invitation to revisit the ideas of assembly and gathering. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make
Things Public,” in Making Things Public : Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
9243

uniform movement, a one-size-fits-all formula.
In that sense, the radical democracy approach, from Mouffe, and suggested by Berry and Moss as an alternative to broaden the relevance andpurpose of a movement concerned with the liberation of culture,13 is not
an alternative to be wished for,14 but as I have shown in Chapter 2, wasin fact already present since the early days of proto-free culture, albeit
not as a conscious mechanism, and then tamed and forgotten with therise of aggregative and deliberative attempts to frame cultural freedom
and filter licenses.
To illustrate my argument, I will give a particular attention to the environments in which such conflictual cooperation and gatherings occur.
To start with, in Chapter 6 I will argue that the software engineering
approach to free cultural production cannot offer a universal model. In
particular, the notions of usefulness and source code cannot be literallytranslated into all practices, which, I will argue, leads free culture to promote a world of digital commons made of digital files and leave the definition of freedom as a technocratic obfuscation that hides its struggle totranslate software freedom to the non-software realm. I will then discuss
the consequence of that in Chapter 7, in particular the fact that the freeculture implementation of classic liberalism reduces cultural value to ac-

13
14

Berry and Moss, “The Politics of the Libre Commons.”
As a matter of fact, Berry and Moss go as far as suggesting their own Res Communes
and the Res Divini Juris licences, which demonstrates their participation in an alreadyexisting enclosed radical democratic space. So unlike their claim, such novel licenses
do not provide a new politico-democratic device but simply contribute to an existing
political agglomerate within free culture.

244cess and potentiality of information, and the reason why file permission15
inspired metaphors have often been used to support the remix-ability ofcultural expressions as a goal. However, by pushing such file permission metaphors to their limits, I will argue that access and potentialityof files that constitute the digital commons does not imply control andsovereignty over said commons, and that it is more important to look at
the systems and environments that produce knowledge around, and help
materialise, free cultural discourses. Having established the importanceof these environments, I will introduce the term sandbox as a rhetorical
tool to explain how such environments operate; and as an overlooked, yet
crucial technological witness, that can help understand the metaphoricaltransformations that have contributed to turning software and licenses,
into groups that can accommodate any forms of values and transactions,
yet that can be fully embedded inside other groups with opposite formsof values and transactions. Finally, in the last chapter of the dissertation,
Chapter 8, I look at what happens when the sandbox fabric is torn up,
when these environments that have been called home16 turn into a deceptive architecture. I will examine what strategies exist, from code andlicense forking, to software exile, that permit the postponing of existential collapse and failure that I am referring to earlier, and that at longlast translates conflicts and tensions into the unspoken apparatus of free

15File permissions are the set of rules that define and regiment access to digital files
in a computer, for instance whether or not a user can modify a file. This will be
explained in more details in the chapter.
16
This is another reference to the organisation of computer file systems, namely thelocation where a user stores their personal files. This will also be explained in details
in the chapter.

245

culture.

246

Chapter 6
The (Almost) EndlessPossibilities of the Free
Culture Template

6.1

Free Software Art Publishing

Debian, which has been mentioned several times in this thesis, is a collection of free and open source software put together to form a complete
operating system (OS) that is called a distro. To be more exact it is aLinux distribution, or a GNU/Linux distribution when it is desirable toput the emphasis on the fact that many such distros rely at their core on
the combination of both the GNU OS—without its kernel called Hurd—and the Linux kernel.1 Indeed, Debian is by no means the only distro

1

For a more extensive account of the historical relationship between the GNU
OS project and the Linux kernel project, and the controversy around the term

247

available. According to the webzine LWN, there are at the time of writing nearly five hundred active distros.2 However, looking at the vertiginous GNU/Linux distribution timeline,3 it is striking to see that the majority of these distros are derived or still directly dependant today, on
only three free software collections that started in the early nineties: Debian, Slackware, and Red Hat. The free software techno-legal template,is therefore not limited to the appropriation of licenses, it also operates
at the level of software code, and in this case, provides the ability to create different operating systems fine tuned for all sorts of purposes andcommunities. But the amount of users is not evenly distributed, and according to DistroWatch, a website dedicated since 2001 to tracking thedevelopment and releases of free and open source Unix-like OS, there
are, at the time of writing, ten “most widely used” Linux powered major
distros: Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, Mageia, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch Linux, CentOS, PCLinuxOS, and Slackware Linux.4
Most distros provide the usual graphical user interface (GUI) desktop
metaphor similar to Mac OS or Windows, and a collection of free andopen source software for both general and specialised tasks. But next
to a standard default selection, these operating systems are connected toseveral repositories of software, that allow the user of the system to add
more software and adapt the OS to their needs and liking. In this con-2
3
4

GNU/Linux, see Williams, Free as in Freedom, Chapter 10 GNU/Linux.
“The Lwn.net Linux Distribution List,” LWN, 2017, https://lwn.net/Distributions/.
Andreas Lundqvist, “GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline,” 2012, http://futurist.se/
gldt/.
Unsigned Integer Limited, “Top Ten Distributions: An Overview of Today’s Top Distributions,” 2017, https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major.

248

text, free and open source software customisation can therefore happen
at two levels: first by picking a particular distro whose base content has
been curated by others, and second by adding software packages that arecompatible with the distro, and generally accessible on networked repositories specific to the chosen distro.5 The flexibility of these operating
systems is such, that almost any distro, whether general or specialisedwith many standard packages provided by default, can be made minimaland bare bones again by removing packages, and changed into somethingradically different at a later stage. Regardless if the distro provides precompiled software or not, the source packages maintained by distro developers, maintainers, and also sometimes less officially by the users themselves, tend to provide the same things: the original source code writtenby the original software author(s), as well as optional patches to apply
on top of it, and the license(s) under which these files are published; themetadata of the distributed software, that is its description, category, anda list of author(s) and maintainer(s); as well as the technical prerequisite
of its installation, that is to say, a list of other packages needed to be installed before, and which the package is dependent. Last but not least,
any changes in these files are logged and stored in the packages them-5

A third level also exists, which is the ability for the user to manually compile othersoftware sources and modify the system quite extensively. This aspect goes beyond
the OS ecosystem itself but is interesting to consider given its link with commercial
activities relying on copyleft or permissive licensing and which ship products basedon existing operating systems, customised and sometimes integrating closed source
software as well. An example of this would be the operating system running on
broadband wireless modems and routers, that can be based on a Linux operating
system and a few more free and open source software projects, the source code ofwhich must be shared by the manufacturer, but not the source code of any othersoftware written by the latter and yet bundled in, and vital to the functionning of thedevice.

249

selves or external databases. These changes combined with the storageof previous versions of the software, and its source code, and the ability toaccess these at any time, literally turns almost any distro into a vast software archaeological excavation site. If this transparency and traceability
facilitates communication and the efficiency of technical infrastructureneeded for making these distros, it is also a side-effect of the free culturallicensing of the distributed software.
Another consequence of the publishing model enabled by free culture
licensing, is that the packages can be mirrored online by anyone withenough storage space and bandwidth. From a user perspective, package
managers—administrative software developed by the distro developers—
can then be used to install, remove or upgrade software, which simplifies
greatly the maintenance of one’s operating system to one’s liking.6 Furthermore, this process is not unidirectional, because users are often given
the possibility to help and give feedback by writing documentation, submit bug reports, write patches for their favourite software, suggest new
software to be packaged, and even maintain such software themselves by
also becoming official maintainers and developers. They can also simply publish other or slightly different software in unofficial repositories
that can be used by other distro users. What is striking here, is thatthese systems are not mere advanced forms of prosumerism, because
their whole infrastructure can be re-appropriated and derived into new

6

In a way these package managers could be perceived as similar to app stores, that are
popular nowadays and found in mobile and desktop operating systems. However,app stores notably do differ in the way they introduce a hierarchy of usefulness,where optional applications are given most visibility, as opposed as traditional package managers where no particular filtering is enforced.

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projects, new operating systems and software collections as shown withthe overwhelming amount of distros available.7
This is why so many distros can be produced and distributed. Thesecan be of different nature, as not only technically specialised distros canbe released, for instance focused on network security8 and privacy,9 scientific computation,10 or medical applications,11 but also any community
has the potential to manifest its interest or ideology under the form of
a distro: enter the stranger than fiction realm of Ubuntu Christian Edition,12 the North Korean Red Star OS,13 and of course Biebian, the Justin
Bieber Linux distribution.14 This level of customisation is such that it has
become its own aesthetics, as software artists Gordan Savičić and Danja
Vasiliev illustrated with their 2011 work The 120 days of *buntu, a collection of 120 modified Ubuntu Operating Systems.15
To be sure, I use Linux distributions as an example here, given their7

It is out of the scope of this research to dive into the specifics of what precisely
constitutes a distro, in practice there are some significant differences from one distro to another. For instance some are truly put together from scratch, while others
are customising an existing operating system, or combining different sources of prepackaged software. Some distro also start provide such level of customisation within
their own installation process, such as the Debian Pure Blend project. See SPI, “Debian Pure Blends,” 2016, https://www.debian.org/blends/.
8
Kali Linux, “Kali Linux | Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking Linux Distribution,”
2017, https://www.kali.org/.
9
The Tor Project, Inc, “Tails - Privacy for Anyone Anywhere,” 2017, https://tails.boum.
org/.
10
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and European Organization for Nuclear Research, “Scientific Linux,” 2017, https://www.scientificlinux.org/.
11
Debian Project, “Debian Med,” 2017, https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/.
12
Jereme Hancock, “Ubuntu Christian Edition – Linux for Christians,” 2012, http://ubuntuce.com/.
13
Korea Computer Center and North Korea, “Red Star Os,” 2013.
14“Justin Bieber Linux,” 2011, http://biebian.sourceforge.net/.
15
Danja Vasiliev and Gordan Savičić, The 120 days of *buntu (Toronto: Beaver Press,2011).

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popular usage and visibility in mainstream tech media, but these modular qualities also exist in other free and open source UNIX-like operating
systems. In fact, as mentioned several times in the first chapter, theseproperties were already visible with the birth of the Berkeley Software
Distribution (BSD). In particular the extreme adaptability of Unix was
the main drive behind the so-called Unix wars, and explained the reason
why the different Unix-like OS failed to reach standardisation in the lateeighties and early nineties.16 If free and open source BSD-derived operating systems differ structurally from Linux distros–in the sense that BSD
OS like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or DragonFly BSD offer a completebase system that can at a later stage be optionally extended with extra software, as opposed to Linux distros piecemeal-assembly17 —their flexibility
and ability to be transformed is as powerful and was demonstrated in thecommercial field due to the permissive licensing of the base system.18
Ultimately, all these Unix-like free and open source operating systems
offer an interesting publishing system, in which archiving, conservation,
distribution, and access are merged into one replicable and modifiable
structure.
Given this potential and possibility to adapt to any cultural context, it
was to be expected that these infrastructures became at some point, also
considered for the collaborative development and distribution of digital

16

Kelty, Two Bits, 5. Conceiving Open Systems.
Matthew D. Fuller, “Design Philosophies,” 2010, https://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/08.
18
For instance Sony relies extensively on FreeBSD and other free and open source software for its PlayStation 4 video game console. See Sony Interactive Entertainment
Inc., “Open Source Software used in PlayStation®4,” 2016, http://doc.dl.playstation.
net/doc/ps4-oss/.
17

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cultural expressions, using and possibly contributing artistic works tothese OS.19 The democratisation of software production and execution in
the form of free and open source Unix-like operating systems, could indeed in theory permit the existence of cooperative forms of publishingfor free and open source code poetry, net art, generative art and softwareart, and also media art, which software elements, free culture supporters have argued,20 could also be released under free and open source
licenses and then integrated into distributed infrastructures. In practice the GNU/Linux distribution Puredyne has distributed works fromsoftware artists such as Alex McLean and Martin Howse21 throughout
the mid-noughties. Similarly, Debian and FreeBSD have distributed andmaintained generative artworks such as Electric Sheep.22 Alongside this,every now and then it is possible for media artists releasing their work
as free and open source software, to be approached by distribution maintainers to help integrate their piece within free and open source operating systems.23 It goes without saying that such software must comply
with the distribution’s guideline, and its localised understanding of user-

19

An idea notably developed in the context of the Debian ecosystem. See Javier Candeira, “Towards a Permanently Temporary Software Art Factory (Notes for the Sustainability of Software Artifacts),” in Readme 100, ed. Olga Goriunova (Norderstedt:
Books on Demand GmbH, 2006), 105–21; Annet Dekker, ed., Archive2020: Sustainable
Archiving of Born-Digital Cultural Content (Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform, 2010), 5;
Anne Laforet, Le Net Art Au Musée: Stratégies de Conservation Des Oeuvres En Ligne(Paris: Questions théoriques, 2011), 162.
20
Anne Laforet, Aymeric Mansoux, and Marloes de Valk, “Rock, Paper, Scissors andFloppy Disks,” in Archive2020: Sustainable Archiving of Born-Digital Cultural Content,
ed. Annet Dekker (Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform, 2010).
21
Laforet, Le Net Art Au Musée, 162.
22
Scott Draves, “The Electric Sheep Screen-Saver: A Case Study in Aesthetic Evolution
Applications of Evolutionary Computing,” Applications on Evolutionary Computing
3449 (2005): 458–67.
23
See Laforet, Mansoux, and Valk, “Rock, Paper, Scissors and Floppy Disks.”

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friendly applications, or usefulness, to refer to the FSF free software criteria discussed in Part 2 of this thesis.
However it is at this point that things start to get complicated and thefree software template shows some limit. While there was no trouble
for a work like Electric Sheep—that essentially and effectively runs asa screen saver—to be accepted as part of large public repositories fromseveral Linux distros and BSD operating systems, the same cannot be
said, maybe thankfully, for other types of digital and media art, in particular software art. If free software contributed to ontological freedom,24
it is not surprising to see that the resulting cultural expansion can nolonger be contained by the very structure that gave birth to it. Said differently, here free software art not only radically challenges the conservative FSF understanding of software as something useful , but once distributed within an operating system, also makes it ambiguous and difficult to separate the OS-as-platform to distribute software art, from the
OS-as-software-art itself. The adaptability of free and open source operating systems, and therefore the possibility for such publishing strategies
to exist outside of major distributions, does not help either. For instance,
Puredyne,25 mentioned earlier, started as a single user operating system
containing free software art works from several artists. However, Pure-

24
25

Cramer, Words Made Flesh, 123.
Also known as pure:dyne and which found its root as a heavily modified versionof the dyne:bolic or DyneBolic distro, itself inspired by and originally based on development tools of LoA hacklab’s Bolic1 distro. See GOTO10, “[Spectre] Pure:dyne
2.3.6 Release - a Gnu/Linux Distro for Media Artists,” 2006, http://post.in-mind.
de/pipermail/spectre/2006-December/007412.html; jaromil and lobo, “dynebolic,”
2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20040102094646/http://www.autistici.org/bolic1/
dyne.php; Adnan Hadzi, Deptford. TV diaries (London: Deptford. TV, 2008), 59.

254dyne was also used by its developers to teach workshops and provide aplatform to encourage artist to use and write free software. As a result it
became more than a singular collection of software shared within a small
community of free software artists, eventually evolving into an hybrid
Debian-Ubuntu distribution, funded by Arts Council England and used
as a media art teaching tool in art organisations, academies and universities.26 In this educational context with a strict separation between tools
and works produced, software culture became an hostage in a discussion
on the pragmatic aspect and usefulness of Puredyne as a whole.
This transformation became conflictual for the Puredyne distro, nowthat its new users, external to the free software art networks from which
Puredyne stemmed, were confronted with a system in which no safeguarding was offered and that was simultaneously a proof of concept
free software art distribution system and a fully functional Unix-like OS.
The safeguarding that I am making reference to is dual: first it assumed
that the users would not need to be constantly assissted or prevented
from doing foolish things, such as wiping out all their data; second, theartistic computation was not separated or isolated from the rest of the system. This second point in particular was discussed during the FLOSS+Art
panel at the 2007 edition of the Make Art Festival,27 Poitiers, France,and specifically on the question of what would be the consequence if
the Puredyne developers modified the source code of a work (Figure 6.1)

26

Julian Brooks, Joanna Brooks and Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, “Across the Great Divide,” Journal of Music, Technology and Education 5, no. 2 (2012): 145–157.
27
GOTO10, “FLOSS+ART : Make Art 2007,” 2007, https://archive.bleu255.com/makeart/
2007/?page=floss&lang=en.

255

Figure 6.1: self3[cpu]Screenshot: Martin Howse, 2006

256

from Howse, so as to provide a version of the software with a more user
friendly program exit mechanism, that is to say, a simple way to quit
the application. This functionality was not present in the original program, and Puredyne users had complained they did not know what to
do once they started the program, and were forced to reboot their machine to make the software stop. This posed a particular problem precisely because Howse’s work in his collaboration with English performer
Jonathan Kemp, essentially drew inspiration from, and also used, operating system mechanisms, including the notion of interrupt signal. The
latter mechanism ended up in this case at the conflicting point of being
both an artistic material for Howse and Kemp, and a critical system feature needed for a classic desktop interaction.
Some other works also touch so directly on the underlying mechanics of the operating system, that they prove very hard to publish in an
executable form, and distributed even in free software art distributions
like the first iteration of Puredyne would have permitted. For instance,
McLean’s ungovernable.patch, a 2011 free software licensed modification
to the Linux kernel that reverts the standard CPU throttling behaviour,makes the CPU frequency decrease under load and increase when themachine is idling,28 and would be unlikely to be accepted in any Linux
based OS that aimed to be fully functional, given this very functionality is questioned by this work. In the end, even liberated from proprietary and closed systems, software art remains an aspect of computational culture that resists entirely free cultural infrastructures, despite

28

Cox and McLean, Speaking Code, 57–58.

257

an apparent closeness in the way they relate to care of software crafting, expressibility of programming, and the sharing of tools. Even if
free software allowed software art to expand itself towards technological layers not accessible in closed source and proprietary systems, it did
not change its nature of being unsustainable by design—therefore uselessand problematic computation—making moot the question of normalisation of such practices within large scale techno-legal infrastructures. As
briefly shown with Puredyne, free software art’s viral property does notexist solely at the licensing level, nor the source code, but the executionof software, that can compromise the OS as a whole if not contained ordiminished. Next to that, the code brutalism29 of these works clashes withthe polished and organised idea of distributed, cooperative, and to someextent decentralised approach to software art publishing. If such systems
would be possible, beyond indexing and classification,30 they would not
be able to provide more than tamed software art, similar to those foundin app stores, and which brutalism becomes emulated or simulated, as
glitchy gimmicks sandboxed in a software white cube, and isolated fromthe computational usefulness of the rest of the system.31

29

Yuill, “Code Art Brutalism.”
Such as Amy Alexander, Olga Goriunova, Alex McLean and Alexei Shulgin,“runme.org - say it with software art!” 2002, http://runme.org/.
31
In this context, it is interesting to put in parallel projects such as the Satromizer
iPhone app and the early performances from group 5VOLTCORE. While the two relate to glitch aesthetics, the first is essentially a standalone graphic tool available fromthe Apple App Store, whereas the second is about direct and abusive live intervention
on computer chips. See Ben Syverson, “Satromizer for IPhone, IPod Touch, and IPadon the ITunes App Store,” 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20100212083220/http://itunes.apple.com/app/satromizer/id312566528; emanuel andel, 5VOLTCORE live,
Online video (San Bruno: YouTube, 2007), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
mmI6DcW0OJE.
30

258

6.2

The Source of Free Cultural Expressions

Another problematic aspect I have yet to discuss is the becoming ofsource code, once the latter has been transposed to non-software culturalexpressions. As discussed several times in this thesis, the importanceof source code availability is essential in free and open source software,and the reason why such availability was fully part of the free software
definition and licensing models. But what about works that are neither
code or software based, which is what non-software free culture is. How
would that work practically?
In Chapter 2, I provided a general overview of how the free software
definition has been slowly transformed, into a series of definitions that
aimed to provide the same freedom and openness for any cultural expressions. As I demonstrated, the affiliation of these definitions was both visible in style and content, and the link with their parent software-centricdefinitions was also blatant. In spite of that, if we take a closer look at thedefinitions in Chapter 1, even though the first attempt in porting the software freedom to knowledge—the four kinds of free knowledge—took into
account the idea of source, the following proto-free-cultural attempts
stopped mentioning it. The reason for this can be put simply: while computer software is a cultural expression,32 not all cultural expressions arecomputer software. Therefore the computer-specific jargon, which theterm source code is, was eventually lost in translation.

32

See Fuller, Behind the Blip.

259

So free cultural definitions are after all not a perfect transposition offree and open source software definitions, due to the lack of, or incomplete, approach to defining what is a source. This is not specific to one
particular approach to free culture, but all the free, libre, and open content, knowledge, expression and work ideas that emerged from the protofree culture era. If the notion of source code is not easily transposable
to non-software free culture, I will argue that its absence is problematicand needs to be addressed.
First of all, from a simple pragmatic perspective, the consequenceof the absence of source means that it is fine to publish and distribute
any content. For instance a low-resolution, highly compressed, photoor video can be distributed freely under these licenses (Figure 6.2). But
then, while these files would perfectly qualify as valid work under theirrespective free and open definitions, their value becomes questionable
when the high-resolution, raw, or less destructively compressed original
digital file, can still remain under other copy or licensing rights. Herethe software equivalent of this process would roughly be the so-calledshareware, a freely distributed, usually closed source, software distribution mechanism in which the full potential of the software is unlocked
only once the user has paid a fee, which would roughly translate fornon-software objects, in paying licensing rights to acquire such sources,in the eventuality these would be anyway available under such type ofclassic licensing. Here the term licensing can be confusing. A work
can be licensed under a free culture license allowing a usage defined by
the terms of the license, but licensing can also refer to any unilateralpermissive process, and in some case reciprocal contracts, in which a
260

Figure 6.2: A maybe free and highly compressed thumbnail

Image: Anonymous, 2013261

work can be commercially licensed for a specific use. For instance a
musician can license their music to an advertisement company to be
used in a television commercial, in exchange for a fee. The two formsof licensing, classic and free culture, do not necessarily exclude eachothers. For instance the music platform Jamendo, invites artists tocontribute free culture licensed music, and at the same time provide
commercial licensing to businesses and individuals so they can use themusic royalty-free.33
Another aspect is what the Freedom Defined project calls the “practical modifiability” of a work,34 which is how in practice a work can beappropriated and modified by someone else. For instance, if the licensed
work is an image composed of several elements, its practical modifiability is affected if the author decides to publish such an image exclusively
as a flattened down work, or if instead the author also provides the layers
used to make this final image. To make things more difficult to follow,
there is also an unavoidable recursive mechanism triggered by the existence of such external pseudo source files. Indeed, and still using theexample of a digital collage, one can ask what would happen if the layers
provided were themselves derived from other originals? Shouldn’t these33

Jamendo claims that it uses a fair model to redistribute the financial gain to the artists
for this commercial licensing, therefore acting as an automated agent for works thatare not commissioned, but in fact they are essentially crowdsourcing their catalogue
for free. Jamendo also suggests artists to use NC licenses combined with the Jamendo
licensing agreement, to make sure they will be paid for their work, whereas in fact it
is a barely disguised strategy to make sure only Jamendo can exploit commercially
their work.See Jamendo, “Jamendo Royalty Free Music Licensing - Stock Music forCommercial Use,” 2017, https://licensing.jamendo.com; Jamendo, “How Are Creative
Commons Licenses Compatible with Jamendo Licensing? What CC License Should
I Choose to License My Music?” 2017, https://artists.jamendo.com/en/artists-faq.
34
Freedom Defined Wiki, “Licenses.”262

also be included? What about the font used for a caption or logo, what
would be the practical modifiability of a rasterised text layer? Would it
make sense to provide the font file? If someone wants to practically modify the file at a level that is not a mashup or remix using the flatten andmerged output—essentially a product of passive consumption—then suchelements are in fact very much needed, and the difficulty of distributing
and accessing grows in proportion with the composite depth of the image(Figure 6.3). The same could be said of course of music as free culture licensed mp3, ogg or FLAC digital files, as opposed to music as free culture
licensed score, separate audio tracks, OSC and MIDI digital dumps of theparameters for the hardware and software synthesizers, settings of thesequencing software, and so forth. And to make things even more complicated, if an author is to distribute the source of their work, this source
being a distinct cultural expression itself, the author is free to distributethe material under separate licenses. Several questions come to mind. Is
it acceptable then for free content to have its assets under non free culture
licenses? Is it acceptable if these external cultural expressions are freely
licensed, yet using closed standards from proprietary software? How far
can these ideas of free, and open, content or works can be pushed?
To address such issues, Myers, whose work was introduced in Chapter 4, offered an idea on what an ideal cultural source could be.35 He
suggested considering five attributes which are: transparent, in an easily editable text-based format; full quality, in a standard that permits the35

See Rob Myers, “Cultural Sources,” 2007, http://robmyers.org/weblog/2007/08/26/
cultural-sources/.

263

Figure 6.3: How deep is your source?

Image: Anonymous, 2013264

recreation of the final format; complete, so that all the materials needed
to produce the distributed work are provided; unencumbered, that is freeof patents and DRM; structured, as in provided in a descriptive format,
such as vector graphics. This theoretical approach is however not fullytranslated in practice. It is worth noting that the FSF, with the 2000 GNU
Free Documentation License (GFDL), had attempted to tackle this problem already, and most notably the notion of transparency, needed for thecollaboration on, and the distribution of free documentation.36 To date,in the history of proto-free and free culture definitions, only Freedom
Defined tried to address this issue. According to them, to truly be a freecultural work, a work must respect four more conditions, and one that is
specific about the notion of source data:
Availability of source data:
Where a final work has been obtained through the compilation orprocessing of a source file or multiple source files, all underlying
source data should be available alongside the work itself under thesame conditions. This can be the score of a musical composition,
the models used in a 3D scene, the data of a scientific publication,
the source code of a computer application, or any other such information.37

There is however an important flaw in this approach: unlike free soft-36

The license was notably used by Wikipedia which later in 2009, demanded the FSF
to change the license, using the infamous “later version” loophole present in most
FSF licenses, to make the content of the online encyclopaedia compatible with thetrending CC BY-SA license, to which it eventually switched without requiring authorisation from the GFDL copyright holders. For some context see Free Software Foundation, “GFDL v1.3 FAQ,” 2014, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.en.html;
timothy, “Wikipedia Moving from GFDL to Creative Commons License,” Slashdot, 2009, \url{https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/05/21/2317253/wikipedia-movingfrom-gfdl-to-creative-commons-license}.
37
The Definition of Free Cultural Works project, “Definition of Free Cultural Works
1.0.”

265

ware licenses that legally implement the free software definition, this extra condition of source data availability is not part of any free culture
approved license terms. It is simply part of a guideline to decide whether
or not a work could truly be called a free cultural work. Said differently,
an author does not have to respect this clause when using a free culture license, because it is not part of the license conditions. In practice,
it is therefore possible to distribute works that are not truly free withfree culture licenses, literally turning free culture into a messy mix ofboth free and non-free cultural expressions. If the different free cultural
techno-legal systems were not already confusing or difficult to navigate
through, they are now genuinely Kafkaesque. Creative Commons evenuses the misleading term “approved for free cultural works,”38 for its licenses that respect the free culture license definition, whereas it reallyshould say that such or such licenses are free culture licenses, no less, no
more.
In practice, a thorough publication of properly licensed source materials for works of art is rare, and is usually limited to artists and collectives
already close to free and open source software communities, such as software artists using free software as a framework. Similar to Vilayphiou
and Leray’s design practice, exposed to this particular mode of production and distribution in their daily use of free software tools, these practitioners eventually applied the same philosophy with their work, andmake many elements of the latter publicly available in repositories, us-38

The affiliation is made visible with a graphical badge in the human-readable summaries of their licenses. See mike, “Approved for Free Cultural Works,” 2008,https://creativecommons.org/2008/02/20/approved-for-free-cultural-works/.

266

ing different software licenses.39 This aspect is particularly obvious forartists and designers using free and open source Unix-like operating systems, and who are therefore exposed to these replicable infrastructures
and their modes of distribution which rely on source code. For instancewith Debian, the connection between source code and freedom is clearly
expressed in its own free software guidelines:• Source CodeThe program must include source code, and must allow distribution
in source code as well as compiled form.
[…]• Integrity of The Author’s Source CodeThe license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form underline{only} if the license allows the distribution of“patch files” with the source code for the purpose of modifying the
program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may
require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software. (This is a compromise. The Debiangroup encourages all authors to not restrict any files, source or binary, from being modified.)40

Infused in such a habitus, these artists adopt them in their own practice, sometime expressing the moral imperative to share back regardlessof the computational usefulness of their work, simply because the latter would not exist in the first place without the access to such tools.41

39

See Lee, “Art Unlimited.”
Perens, “Debian’s ‘Social Contract’ with the Free Software Community.”
41
This explanation comes up fairly often in interviews. See Romero, FLOSSOFÍA: El
Software Libre en el Arte; Annalisa Cannito, Chui Yong Jian and Santiago Bence, Arts
Meets Radical Openness.
40

267

However, such an attitude towards the meticulous sharing of source material is unlikely to become popular, due to the complete or partial disappearance of an articulated concept of source. In fact, by cleaning up
the computer jargon when software freedom was transposed to culture,
the moral justification of free software which was embedded in this ideaof source code availability, disappeared as well. In spite of the idea of
defined deliberative free culture presented as an ethical counterpart of
the aggregative market driven CC licensing that I discussed in Chapter
2, the ethics of free culture have no means by which to materialise. As
a result, and in a strange twist, the imperfect transposition of software
freedom to cultural freedom also has a negative impact on free and open
source software itself:
Can I apply a Creative Commons license to software?
We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. […] Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which isoften important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software.42

Indeed CC licensed software, even though as culturally free as free andopen source software, is in fact a pseudo form of free and open source
software. For instance an obfuscated and compressed JavaScript librarycan easily be distributed with a CC BY-SA license, or simply a CC BY
license, therefore encouraging the widespread of said library, yet making
it clear that its inner mechanisms are not the concern of anyone but its
original authors. In this case, free culture in practice seems closer to a42

Creative Commons, “Frequently Asked Questions.”268

gratis sharing consumer culture rather than a liberated and empowered
productive apparatus. It is also significant that in CC’s perspective, as
shown in the quote above, the question of modifiability is only an issue
for software.
The problem of source has yet to be solved at the time of writing, butsome efforts to take into account this issue are worth mentioning. In
fact, as early as 2004, the Open Art Network started to work on the OpenArt license (OAL), also known as the View Source license, or simply the
Source License.43 Even though this license would be considered today as
non-free because it prohibited commercial use, it requested that “source
file/s for the work must remain accessible to the public”. Unfortunately,
there was no consideration on the nature of the standard used for such
source files. OAL made no difference between free software and proprietary software, and no difference between open or close file formats andstandards. Another take on the question can be found in the ongoingwork from French composer and pianist Valentin Villenave, on a licensethat would solve some of the source issues discussed so far, yet unpublished to this date. Villenave is an active member of the Copyleft Attitude community from which the free culture FAL was born, as discussed
in Chapter 3. His idea is to modify the FAL, in a way that it would require the artist to provide all intermediary source material used during
the creation of a work of art. This would include sketches and research inall versions. If at any given time a source element is involved, it must be

43

See Open Art Network, “The Source License,” 2004, http://web.archive.org/web/
20041208023918/http://three.org/openart/.

269

provided, so as to avoid a situation, according to Villenave, where what
is given access to, is in fact a summary of the work and not the work as awhole.44 This approach would be, according to the musician, a concrete
way to resist the passive and commodified consumption of free culturalexpressions, and connect back with the free software engineering freedom, where re-usability and modularity is necessary for any progress
and innovation, and at the same time preventing free culture from turning into gratis sharing consumer culture or a shareware culture, to use
the analogies I made earlier. However, with this extra step, it seems thatour problem is expanding further and further beyond the recursive vertigo triggered by diving into the cultural sources of cultural sources: it isalso reaching the context in which these very sources are created.

6.3

Sharing Is Caring but How Many Files Are
Enough?

The problem with the notion of cultural source is that it is difficult todraw a clear line between a well defined cultural artefact and the context in which the latter has been produced once culture has been reduced
to shareable files. Free culture does not provide a solution, but instead
further stresses this reduction. What is more, this situation creates afollow-up in the digital realm to some reflections of twentieth century

44

Valentin Villenave, “Re: Sources d’une Oeuvre (Was Re: [Copyleft_attitude] Fwd: Re:[Revenu-Existence:1310] Affiches Pour Promotion Du Revenu d’existence -> Comment Partagez Vous Vos Oeuvres Libres ?),” 2011, https://listes.april.org/wws/arc/
copyleft_attitude/2011-10/msg00042.html.

270

American philosopher Nelson Goodman, and more precisely in his 1968
book Languages of Art, in which the distinction is made between autographic and allographic works of art. Goodman’s interpretation of theart object is of course not developed in the context of artistic cooperation and collaboration, but it does overlap coincidently with some of theintellectual property issues covered in this thesis as it approaches the concept of authenticity by looking at the difference between originals andcopies.45 According to the philosopher’s examples, painting is qualified
as autographic because a copy of the original work is never authentic,
while music is allographic, because the work of the composer is finishedwith the writing of a score that can be used for multiple authentic performances; he also notes that art can be formed of multiple stages, giving
examples with printmaking being both two-stage like and autographic,
which helps him clarify that autographic art must not necessarily translate into the production of one unique object.46 These reflections on art
and the work of art, leads Goodman to eventually develop a theory ofnotation, where stipulations are made for the creation and use of satisfactory systems of notation.47 This approach is close to the questions of
how to define the source of cultural works and what would be an acceptable medium and protocol to create and distribute these.
However, the difference with Goodman is that even though free culture seems to employ a rigorous syntactic and semantic system, its theory

45

Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), III Art and Authenticity.
46
Ibid., 113–15.
47
Ibid., IV The Theory of Notation.

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of notation—that is built upon software data and licenses—is not fixed; itevolves constantly. Consequently, although it escapes the reductionism
employed by Goodman, it nonetheless fails to capture anything sharply
despite a techno-legal apparatus that keeps on expanding. This is particularly visible for artistic practices that have emerged from this techno-legal
changeability, such as live coding which originally came from the desire
to use free software programming as both a performance art medium andapproach to improvisation in the context of electronic dance music.48 Thisparticular practice is exemplary of the appropriation of free and open
source in the arts,49 but it also shows the limitation of the free culture
rational, defined, and quantifiable notation system. In such a practice,“the specificity of code is opened towards the indeterminism of improvisation,”50 however, its distributivity also make irrelevant the multiple
staging analysis of art production within and outside of the scope of its
reproduction, and in turn makes it impossible to determine which of allof its original sources is the most valuable.
Defining an artistic source is as problematic as defining the languageof art, yet the access to increasingly sophisticated legal and technologicaltools, which can enforce a fine-grained versioned capture of the artistic creation, directly fuels an endless quest to capture the “participation
mystique” of the poet.51 What happens is that by being unable to extract

48

Alex McLean, “Hacking Perl in Nightclubs,” 2004, http://www.perl.com/pub/2004/08/
31/livecode.html.
49
Simon Yuill, “All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved by the Masses: Free Open
Form Performance, Free/Libre Open Source Software, and Distributive Practice,” in
FLOSS+Art, ed. Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk (Poitiers: GOTO10, 2008).
50
Ibid., 69.
51
In reference to Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933; repr., London:272

universal usefulness from cultural production—as opposed to the slighty
more defined usefulness of free software or free art discussed in Chapter
3—a technologically assisted brute force approach to capture everythingis set into motion. The argument from Cramer that without a dump of anartist’s storage device no complete works or biography can be written,52
shows how the quantification and capture of data footprints has both
revitalised discussions on intermediality, but also demonstrates the infiltration of information technology into the art discourse beyond practicalquestions of conservation, archiving, and documentation. This strategy
of sharing as dumping whatever has been digitally captured, was exemplified early on with the Praystation Hardrive [sic] published in 2001. The
later was a CD-ROM containing raw data from the hard drive of media
artist and Macromedia Flash specialist Joshua Davis.53 The shared data
was meant to be explored, studied, and reused. Even though the content
was far from being a raw bitstream copy of the designer’s drive, it was
nonetheless quite an impressive collection of 3637 files of all sorts andspread in a maze of folders. Some scholars made a parallel between thisproject and the free and open source ethos,54 but this is a misunderstanding of how free software and open source operate, because the files were

Routledge, 2001), Psychology and Literature.
See Florian Cramer, “Peer-to-Peer Services: Transgressing the Archive (and Its Maladies?),” in adonnaM.mp3 - Filesharing, the Hidden Revolution in the Internet, ed.
Franziska Nori (Frankfurt: MAK, 2003).
53
Joshua Davis, Praystation Hardrive (Wan Chai: Systems Designs Ltd., 2001).
54
Boris Cuckovic and Hrvoje Stancic, “Open Source in Art: Originality, Art Process
and Digital Preservation,” in INFuture2009: Digital Resources and Knowledge Sharing,
2009; Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 54.
52273

released without any licenses or copyright notices.55 Effectively the drive
fell instead into the gooey grey swamp that is unspecified public domain
and default copyright laws. Still, its tremendous positive impact on theFlash user community, both as an educational and inspiring cultural artefact, demonstrated the effectiveness of a brute force approach to sharing.
A strategy whose motto could be: if in doubt, share it all.
But this makes me wonder about the process of production. If the
hypothetical aim here is to provide the source code of an artwork, why
not try to capture the creative process as well?56 This situation would
share some resemblance with the first attempts of commercial art galleries in the early seventies, to claim back conceptual art in a commodified form by encouraging the collection of by-products, artefacts, anddocuments, that could generate commercial interest accentuated by thenovelty practices these objects came from.57 It also brings back the possible analogy between artistic use of free cultural licensing with priorattempts to use the contract as a means of institutional critique like The
Artist’s Contract by Siegelaub, as briefly discussed in Chapter 3. However,here the emphasis is no longer on aesthetics, but rather whether or notthese practices reinforce or instead liberate the autonomy of the artist,and how these new methods of documenting, archiving, and publishingtransform the language of art. These issues are important ones to take
into account, in order to evaluate the becoming of the artistic practice55

Email from Joshua Davis to the author, June 8, 2012.
See Annet Dekker and Jeroen van Mastrigt, “Serious Archiving: Preserving the Intangible by Capturing Processes,” in Archive2020: Sustainable Archiving of Born-Digital
Cultural Content, ed. Annet Dekker (Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform, 2010).
57
Taylor, Avant-Garde and After, 34.
56

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in free culture where—as I mentioned earlier—liberation and empowerment also creates a consumer culture of sharing; in fact a multi-layered
sharing economy. So without noticing it, the frustration coming fromthe lack of definition of artistic sources, combined with the increasing
digital capture of human activity, is an open door towards a commodified analysis and recording of the artistic practice itself, where Snelting’s
awkward gestures58 of free software craftsmanship I discuss in Chapter
4, could end being misinterpreted as movements waiting to be sampledwith all sorts of sensors and captors. With increasing means by which
to sample phenomenons into data sets, if there is more to these sources
than just a flattened object, nothing prevents the capturing of such intermediality by also providing electroencephalographic data, DNA samples,
cosmological models and more, thus transforming the capture of prettymuch any phenomenon into the source of art as noumenon, and reduce
culture to an ever expanding digital Voyager Golden Record, constantly
challenging Lyotard’s hypothesis that knowledge cannot be translated inits entirety by machines.59 If anything at all, I might well suggest a new
free cultural license, the Borges Public License, for tomorrow’s librariansof Babel,60 and their lawyers.
By only focusing on the techno-legal infrastructure that permits the
distribution and the processing of data, information, and content, thevalue of what is being distributed and processed is however constantly

58

Snelting, “Awkward Gestures.”
Lyotard, Rapport Sur Les Problèmes Du Savoir Dans Les Sociétés Industrielles Les Plus
Développées, 5–7.
60
In reference to Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions (1944; repr., London: Penguin Books, 2000),
The Library of Babel (1941).
59

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re-contextualised. Its raison d’être becomes more ambivalent. As I said,
the difficulty of qualifying a universal usefulness to what is shared—
essentially the failure to define a universal approach to the digitalcommons—means that old paradigms such as quantity versus quality
have became superseded by potentiality versus accessibility. The nineties
debate on the societal benefit of digitally distributed knowledge,61
has thus been transformed since the mid noughties into discussions
on culture as a digital commons, where the latter is assessed on thefunction of possible opportunistic transformation and instantaneous
availability. Free culture is not responsible for this but is symptomaticof this trend, and its implementation of a sharing economy does notcreate an alternative to this situation. It is yet another variation of an
information society built on top of techno-legal pipes, in which dataflows from one processing unit to another, so as to shape and develop
an infinite Lego construction site. Here I make the analogy with Legoagain—after introducing its connection with engineering culture andfree and open source software in Chapter 1—because if the playfulnessof the Lego methodology for cultural production is not so far fromthe metamechanics of Swiss sculptor and painter Jean Tinguely, it also
shows that there is a limit to the translation of engineering culture toartistic methodologies. The result is the risk of building an infrastructure
optimised for non-existing practices, based on shortcuts that simplify
cultural production to an equivalent of industrial production, in which
engineering processes and re-usability are essential for innovation.

61

Lévy, L’intelligence Collective. Pour Une Anthropologie Du Cyberspace; Lévy, World
Philosophie.

276

I refer to non-existing practices because the discussion on sources andcontext shows that art and design practices do not always rely on existing free cultural works, and therefore have little use for what the freeculture machinery excels at: the bureaucratic organisation of many digital files. In fact, even within dedicated free culture supporters, the very
access to usable sources, let alone even finished works, from their peers
is only anecdotally relevant. For instance, according to Vilayphiou andLeray, but also other graphic designers working with free software anddistributing their work under free culture licenses, such as Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente from the Porto based design studio Manufactura Independente,62 not all the material found in free cultural licensed
graphic design is useful for other designers. In particular, for Carvalho
and Lafuente there is a constantly moving frontier made between some
low-level components deemed somehow neutral that can be useful, suchas a software tool or a font, and on the other side an authorship tainted
higher level artistic object, like a finalised poster design or illustrationthat is judged too contextually specific to be useful.63 Here again we’reconfronted with the problem of staging what Goodman faced when working on the question of authenticity, but then if free culture demonstrates
anything, it is that there cannot be one finite number of stages during themaking of art, and that the art object itself can also move across all thesestages depending on the context of its making, distribution, performance,

62

This comment was made to me during an interview with the two graphic designers,
during the 2013 Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) in Barcelona.
63
This is especially visible when comparing a general vector graphics database suchas the OpenClipArt library, and the much more personal vektorDB database fromdesign group LAFKON. See LAFKON, “vektorDB,” 2012, http://vektordb.lafkon.net.

277

appreciation … and usefulness for others.
By trying to turn cultural fuzziness into a quasi-industrial and modular
composite machine, free culture falls into the trap emerging from its own
attempt to demystify cultural production, but it also fails to be representative of the cultural workers who produce such free culture. In particular the question of re-usability shows that appropriation art and remix
practices are a very good demonstration of the advantage of free culturalprocesses over more conservative IP mechanisms, but it is also an inflated
tale that helps argument more easily the question of economic accessibility and potentiality of digital culture. To be sure, I do not mean that there
are no such things as remix or appropriation within free culture, but thatoutside specific practices, such as artistic strategies of citation or appropriation, or playful collaboration within close collectives and networks,
as discussed in Chapter 2, or as witnessed in small-scale free software art
collaborations,64 they remain singular and localised processes. As for thesource of a work, Leray explained to me during our discussion that fromthe perspective of OSP, there was possibly more value in sharing the documentation of moments of creation and explaining why these moments
matter—what the collective calls recipes—rather than just dumping collections of source files and digital assets under free culture licenses. In
the case of free culture supporters like OSP, it means that the brute force
if in doubt share it all dump approach is reaching a new level, by not just64

Annet Dekker, “Enabling the Future, or How to Survive FOREVER: A Study of Networks, Processes and Ambiguity in Net Art and the Need for an Expanded Practiceof Conservation” (PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014), 5. The Valueof Openness.

278

preemptively providing access to the things they are unable to attributea universal usefulness, but by also making the considerable effort to provide guidance within the dump and explain why some are useful to them.
With this strategy, the rationalisation of sharing into a free cultural peerto-peer file exchange, becomes once again the basis of a human-to-humanrelation.

279

Interlude
As shown in the second part of the dissertation, art and cultural platforms can thrive on techno legal constraints. It also explains why someelements of proto free culture, discussed in Part 1, have translated intovery diverse practices. Therefore the populating of free culture is not always specific to free culture, and is more likely to relate to the natureof the environments in which they emerge. Yet, free culture supporters,with their desire to protect such environments by an over-articulationor principles and rules, overlook the fact that the very failure of this attempt does not prevent cultural development, but is instead an importantcomponent, a veritable fruit défendu, from which new practices and transactions will be fed. Of course, the hypothesis brought to the fore by thefree culture argument, is that eventually cultural constraints will be sostrong and repressive, that all these practices will end up stifled and at theservice of a commodification process that harvests the work of artists.1
However, the same logic offered by free culture when pushed to the extreme, leads to another form of commodification provoked by the endless

1

David M. Berry and Giles Moss, “Art, Creativity, Intellectual Property and the Commons: Can Free/Libre Culture Transform Art?” Free Software Magazine 6 (2005).

280

techno legal possibilities of rationalising cultural productions which become a highly contained disposable material, by making the incorrect
generalisation that culture can be broken down into engineered blocks ofthings that can be combined and recombined to create new objects andproducts.2
In sum, the techno-legal free software template has helped form constraints and inspire a wide range of artistic practices discussed in Part 2,
but this same template can also limit the cultural scope and the intentionof those who appropriate it, thus making free culture unfit for generalisation, or at least creating more problems than it solves when adopted
blindly. Another aspect that I wanted to reflect upon was what happens
to cultural production when it adopts a model that is essentially derived
from engineering. If on the one hand, engineering methods of prototyping and pipelining opened up new way to engage with the making ofartistic work, from the writerly command line to notions of source code
brutalism, these methods cannot be decoupled from a certain approach toorganise and categorise digital information in their systems of execution
and distribution. This led me to explain that in such systems, once again,
free cultural practices that rely on precise definitions cannot accommodate all sorts of cultural expressions, which I illustrated by taking free soft-2

To be fair, Berry’s and Moss’ views, especially in relation to Creative Commons,changed quickly and radically a year after their paper I am referencing above. See
Berry and Moss, “The Politics of the Libre Commons.”. Their argument remains however a very good illustration of how such alternatives are perceived at first and become quickly viral and popular within the cutural field. But once its mechanics are
more apparent, other interpretations become possible, leading possibly to disenchantment, which is why I will next introduce the sandbox analogy to explore this particular process, and why free culture in general can be so ambivalent despite its precise
techno-legal articulation.

281

ware art as an extreme example of runtime incompatibility. It also struckme that the question of source, which I argued was the core foundationof software freedom, was impossible to articulate simply once transposed
to non-software cultural expressions, making free culture fragile, threatening to become nothing more than another form of file sharing system.
What is more, these problems of translation show that the core value ofthese systems are only revolving around the questions of access to data
and the potentiality of transformation of such data.
With these limits exposed I wanted to highlight the paradox of thefree culture constraint, as both liberating and entrapping, raising fences
to protect practices and at the same excluding others. Building upon thisidea of walled gardens, I will use the last two chapters of this thesis todraw a model of such systems that take into account these conflicts andparadoxes, and demonstrate how these paradoxes allow free culture tosustain itself and evolve through time. In the next chapter I will attend
to the kind of environments, or platforms, that are created by free culture. I will take the notion of remix, which is popularly used in the freeculture narrative as a point of departure, to illustrate that the question ofaccess can be highly manipulative and deceptive. By doing so, it is myintention to highlight how techno-legal frameworks provide an inconspicuous social cohesion and a set of rules, which only become visible
and questionable when the systems of belief they create are challenged
by a conflictual event. For this, I introduce the term sandbox as a way
to describe and refer to such platforms. The idea of cultural sandboxing282

exists in the neighborhood of other notions such as discourse,3 fields,4subcultural5 and post-subcultural models,6 ideological state apparatus,7art platforms,8 and also Heidegger’s Gestell 9 amongst others. However,these are also markedly different and I find it necessary to coin the term
sandbox to highlight the very specific type of framing made by softwareenvironments and licensing, and the containment they provide, therefore
building upon the notions of foundation and territoriality hinted in thesecond part of the thesis.
If the impact of rationalisation, commodification, and normalisation
on culture has already been addressed extensively in the literature, withthe sandbox model I want to show more precisely how this operates andis implemented at a techno-legal level, at a time where the role of software in society, and its underlying algorithms, is increasingly scrutinised.
This is why the idea of sandboxing also relates to the mix that Kelty had
noted between operating systems and social systems, while inspired by
the tag line “Operating Systems and Social Systems” of the first editionof the Wizard of OS conference in 1999.10 However unlike Kelty, inside
the sandbox, I do not limit the mix only to hackers, but any users, given

3

Michel Foucault, L’archéologie Du Savoir (1969; repr., Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
Bourdieu and Wacquant, “La Logique Des Champs.”
5
Hebdige, Subculture.
6
David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl, “What Is ‘Post-Subcultural Studies’ Anyway?” in The Post-Subcultures Reader, ed. David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl(Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2003).
7
Louis Althusser, Positions (1964-1975) (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1976), Idéologie etappareil Idéologique d’État (AIE).
8
Olga Goriunova, Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (London: Routledge, 2013).
9
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1977), The question concerning technology (1954).
10
Kelty, Two Bits, 36–43.
4283

the omnipresence of today’s operating systems and increasingly complex
terms of service (TOS) in all sorts of appliances. In that sense, if there wasa point in time where such a mix might have been observed remotely
and limited to some hacker subculture, such distance is definitively questionable with today’s 24/7 network connectivity for most, and will beeventually made irrelevant with the upcoming of the so-called Internetof Things (IoT)—and regardless how this will be marketed and promotedin the coming decades—which will impose such a mix on everyone. Aspart of my argument I will both use examples from operating systems
and free culture licensing, to show how this particular sandboxing operates both at a software and legal level, and provides an update to thenotion of blackboxing.11 I will discuss the ubiquity of sandboxing, wherelegal and technological openness does not necessarily equate with user
empowerment and technological literacy.

11

In reference to Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

284

Chapter 7
From Techno-Legal Templates
to Sandbox Culture

7.1

Deceptive Participations in a RO/RW Remix
CultureIn the previous chapter I have departed from the argument on innovationthat is central in the free culture discourse—made popular by Lessig to
explain why he believes free software is a model to develop free culture—
because if the analogy of software re-usability seemed to transpose theoretically to culture in relation to productivity, sharing ideas, and inspiration, the same analogy was clearly over stretched when in practice culture
had been reduced to file-sharing and the remix of flattened down works.
The latter practice, which refers to the problem of lack of cultural source
discussed in the previous chapter, demonstrates that all the subtleties,
tensions, plays, and conflicts, found in the way works respond and relate285

to each other, as was exemplified, for instance, with the 1973 influence
analysis and theory from literary critic Harold Bloom,1 are at the risk ofbeing streamlined to their weakest form of pleasurable and entertaining
collages, as Benjamin had predicted in his time for photography.2
To be sure, I am not saying that remix is per se a poor practice thatsolely exemplifies the failure of artists to change the productive apparatus. Growing from the versioning of Jamaican songs into dub music, toits systematisation in the nineties music industry, the remix has been
increasingly used to demonstrate the power of combinatorial practices.3
For instance, remix can be used literally as an experimentation, an appropriation of the medium and its instruments, as it is in the practice ofturntablist Janek Schaeffer;4 and it can also be instrumental in anotherway, as a framework to analyse the semantics of political discourse, as
illustrated in the President George W. Bush’s 2002 “Axis of Evil” speech
remix from artist Lenka Clayton.5 Regarding the latter approach, I would
go as far as to say that remix as a folk political tool has worked in thepast as proto-tactical media. For example, in the mid-eighteenth century
Paris, folk songs were spread orally in popular neighbourhoods. But
these songs were not just for entertainment, they were also used fromtime to time as a vector to memorise and spread commentary and cri-

1
2
3
4
5

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973; repr., New York:
Oxford University press, 1997).
Benjamin, “The Author as Producer.”See Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2012).
Janek Schaefer, “AudiOh!: Appropriation, Accident and Alteration,” Leonardo Music
Journal 11, no. 1 (2001): 71–76.
Lenka Clayton, Qaeda, Quality, Question, Quickly, Quickly, Quiet, limited ed. vinyl(hand-numbered ed. of 1000), (2004).

286

tiques on public affairs.6 The well known melodies of existing songs wereused as carriers, in which the original lyrics were replaced by critical texts
and poetry, which would have been banned and illegal otherwise, thus
turning the process of influence to which I was referring earlier, not intomere entertaining collages but into a powerful political communication
network of remixes, building upon the effect of the latter as a “subversionof the listener’s expectations.”7 Furthermore, the transformative generalisation offered by remixing makes it possible to link it easily to all sorts
of practices and theories, from musique concrète, to appropriation art,
intertextuality and dialogism, and more. With such adaptability in mind,
writer Eduardo Navas describes remix as a “cultural glue,”8 as opposed toa movement or something that can be framed precisely. The message isstrong as it relies on the obvious cultural mechanisms in which any object
is a cultural product, specifically an object deriving from existing ideas
and technologies and therefore, through cultural diffusion, yes indeed, ofcourse, everything can be seen as a remix of something else.
With that said, if some have made the claim indeed, that “everything
is a remix,”9 the remix becomes problematical however when it is used toshowcase democratic processes of participation in cultural production.
Before showing why this is an issue, I must first explain how remix andfree culture relate to each other in file-sharing culture. The instrumen-

6

7
8
9

Robert Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in EighteenthCentury Paris (2010; repr., Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,2012).
Michael Veal, Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 89.
Navas, Remix Theory, 4.
Kirby Ferguson, “Everything Is a Remix,” 2010, http://everythingisaremix.info.

287

talisation of remix culture to justify the purpose of free culture was infact articulated by Lessig himself. More explicitly, Lessig used terms
from the file system permissions read-only (RO) and read-write (RW),
which he called geek-speak metaphors, in order to illustrate the mechanisms of remix culture.10 This approach to remix and culture, that holds
a privileged position in Lessig’s free culture,11 was the obvious next stepin a process of cultural rationalisation reduced to file-exchange, and inwhich participation thus also became reduced to file permissions. This
geek-speak metaphor is not only used by CC, but also within some of
the groups and networks mentioned in the previous thesis part.12 Of
course, the advantage of such simplification is that it offers a very strong
example, as it relies upon technological jargon and practices that havebeen increasingly democratised with the rise of the Internet and P2P filesharing. In that sense it also becomes a subversive vector that can beused to accelerate the spread of new ideas, in a similar way as was theengineering of popular tunes mentioned earlier. This is why remixing
has been frequently used by CC as: an inspiration,13 a handy shortcut
to communicate about licensing changes,14 and a way to illustrate the10

Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy(London: A&C Black, 2009), 28.
11
Berry, Copy, Rip, Burn, 22.
12
See for instance Constant, “Tools for a Read-Write World,” 2013, http://www.
constantvzw.org/site/Tools-for-a-Read-Write-World.html.
13
In the early days of CC, there was even a series of rather confusing Sampling licenses,
that were inspired directly from remix practices. The licenses were however flawed
in several aspects and were eventually retired in favour of more generic licenses. For
more details on retired CC licenses, see Creative Commons, “Retired Legal Tools,”
2017, https://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses/.
14
Creative Commons, “Big Win for an Interoperable Commons: BY-SA and FAL
Now Compatible,” 2014, \url{https://creativecommons.org/2014/10/21/big-win-foran-interoperable-commons-by-sa-and-fal-now-compatible/}.

288

potentiality of CC’s “pool of content”15 .
It is interesting that this particular understanding of remixing, as aquantifiable form of commodified reusable artistic elements also leaks
into the contemporary art discourse. For instance, French art historianand critic Nicolas Bourriaud stated in 2002 that the artistic question is nolonger what can we make that is new, but instead what can we do withwhat we have.16 And with this point he argued that artists were no longer
considering the artistic field as a museum containing works that mustbe cited or surpassed, but as so many storehouses filled with tools thatshould be used, stockpiles of data with which to manipulate and present.
According to Bourriaud, artists are remixers and the consumption andproduction of information are no longer so separate. He sees artists as,
what he calls, semionauts who can produce endless narratives and journeys within information. However, once the art critic gives examples ofsuch an artistic approach and dissolution of the barrier between consumption and production, a completely different image is painted and whichclearly demonstrates the discrepancy between remix as a creative mechanism and remix as a controlled environment. When Bourriaud quotes
French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, the pre-condition of this newpractice becomes in particular very clear:

Even if it is illusory and Utopian, what matters is introducing a sortof equality, assuming the same capacities, the possibility of an equal

15

Creative Commons, “About the Licenses - Creative Commons,” 2017, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/, What our licenses do.
16
Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms theWorld (2002; repr., New York: Lukas et Sternberg, 2005), Introduction.

289

relationship, between me - at the origins of an arrangement, a system - and others, allowing them to organize their own story in response to what they have just seen, with their own references.17

But, how can equality exist when such forms of sharing are built on
the premises that these systems are, in fact, understood as an origin towhich responses are expected? In this situation, remixing is limited to aprocess in which an original becomes the source of an anticipated creative chain reaction. The spectre of access and potentiality discussed in
the previous chapter returns, from the famous artist waiting for an audience to recombine the elements of their work, to CC waiting for users torecombine the elements of their digital commons. Similarly, free culture
supporters have done poorly in making their cause resonate beyond theconcerns of very few privileged classes. According to scholar Laura J.
Murray, the popular documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto is essentiallythe glorification of a North American white male middle class culture, insearch of some Robin Hood-like thrills by doing something that could beillegal, and where stereotypes of gender and stardom are carried with absolutely no awareness or reflection.18 These disconnections between theway these discourses present themselves and how they materialise are,however, not specific to contemporary cultural appropriation of remixing. In fact this ambivalence was already present in one of remix culture’s
exemplary cases: dub music.
In late sixties Jamaica, dub music was born from a mixing mistake that

17
18

Ibid., 13.
Laura J. Murray, “Brett Gaylor (Dir.) (2009) RiP: A Remix Manifesto,” Culture Machine
CM Reviews (2009).

290led to the creation of a dubplate—a non durable acetate disc on which themaster recording was cut for testing and demonstration purposes—from
which the vocal track was omitted. The disc was nonetheless kept andplayed during a sound system gig. The lack of vocal track was turned
into an opportunity for the deejay to improvise over the instrumental
music, to the delight of the crowd.19 The immediate success of the accidental performance of both the studio mixing and of the deejay, toasting
and chatting over the faulty dubplate, led to one of the richest musical dialogues of the twentieth century, where the live performance of sound system deejays inspired producers to make new versions of Jamaican songs,
using the sound mixer and effects such as spring reverb and tape delays
as improvisational instruments. The resulting dubplates fed back into
the sound system improvisation culture, and back again into the studios.
Looking at dub music from the sole perspective of the remix as a creative
mechanism, it is possible to draw extensive analysis on its formal aesthetics, its sonic qualities, and its semiosis.20 However, it is also possible tolook at dub music from the perspective of the remix as a controlled environment. American scholar Michael Veal has written extensively on thehistory and development of dub music21 , and has most notably analysed
the original dub culture beyond its technical and sonic qualities. From
Veal’s research, it is not a big stretch to say that dubplates functioned as

19

The origin of the myth and its narrative is slightly controversial, and there exists
different accounts on the birth of this genre. See Navas, Remix Theory, 37–38.
20
For more discussion on the study of remix, see Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher and
Xtine Burrough, ed., The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (New York: Routledge, 2015).
21
Veal, Dub.

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an addictive product, sold to competing sound systems which, in order toattract an audience and sell alcohol, constantly needed new stocks—thedubplates were self-deteriorating plates—and new uniquely cut versionsof popular tunes. Sound system sometimes even paid extra for dubplate
specials, a particular version of a popular song, with the lyrics modified
to praise the sound system that had effectively paid for the placed advertisement, but essentially these sound systems were advertisement andsponsoring platforms for the tracks used as source material for the dub
versions.22 Here remix worked as a sort of twisted reverse crowdfunding scheme, where the original tracks were never given to the sound systems, and were only made available to purchase in music stores, ownedby the same studios that produced the dub versions. On top of that, atthe source of the versioned tracks were studio musicians working undervery precarious conditions, and were often required to come up with finished music for a whole album to be recorded in a day, or provide a seriesof reusable beats and melodies with no possibility of claiming copyright.
The riddims—essentially a database of artistic media—from which new
tracks and their dub versions could be generated over and over again.23
With many musicians in Jamaica, the competition and pressure to makeriddims for studios was very high, even with terrible working conditions.
The situation was also amplified due to poorly implemented copyright
law in Jamaica—initially imposed by the UK in 1911 with little consider-22

For an overview of the dub music market and relation to sound systems, see ibid.,54.
23
See Sharma Latoya Taylor, “Reggaenomics: The Relationship Between Copyright
Law and Development in the Jamaican Music Industry” (PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2013), 53–56.

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ation of the local oral culture in folk music—which allowed the rise ofa copyright infringing Jamaican music industry, which treated music asa public domain resource.24 This however became an issue once some
Jamaican musical genres and artists, in particular Bob Marley, started to
profit greatly from a globalised music industry, and led to the ban of all
versioned music from radio airing in Jamaica following pressure and lobbying by the musicians’ union. This action was however mostly a symbolic gesture as sound systems were much more powerful advertising
platforms than radio.25 As Veal concludes, despite its counter hegemonic
nature, as well as the singing and improvising to an instrumental popular
track used as vector to carry new discourse, there was a another side tosuch practices, with dub becoming the sound of “profit consolidation andcompetition.”26
With this example, I am not arguing that a conservative and restrictive
approach would be more beneficial than unregulated copyright and public domain derived cooperation. Instead, I want to point out that the freecirculation and transformation of information cannot be directly linked
to an egalitarian participation in a liberated productive apparatus. This
shortcut is indeed problematic because it ignores the aspect of political
economy in relation to these practices. Even if a detailed analysis of suchan aspect is out of the scope of this dissertation, it nevertheless cannot
be completely ignored, discarded, or rendered moot by considering freecultural practices as existing in a vacuum. In that sense, this free circu-

24

Ibid., 42–59.
Veal, Dub, 91.
26
Ibid., 90.
25

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lation of information encourages that new things constantly compete to
become new mediating hubs or nodes of capitalisation, and thereby providing the ground for a near textbook illustration of classical liberalism,in which coordination by a central agency is replaced with a system ofcompetitive arrangements of information conveying agents.27 Exploitation that is driven by the division of labour in such a chain of distribution
is therefore no more absolute but instead relative, which explains why
the counter-hegemonic power of the Jamaican music industry, which has
also liberated and empowered the sound engineering culture of Jamaica,
comes at the price of reducing the cultural and political power of folk
musicians. In particular, I can see an inversion of the situation of thesubversive use of folk songs in mid-eighteenth century Paris, because
Jamaican lyricists, but also song writers like Bob Marley, saw dub as adamaging practice in which political texts were removed, erased, andovershadowed by effects and mixing techniques.28 According to Veal,
the whole versioning process can therefore be sensed as a direct resultof capitalist influence in the making of music, that turns folkloric practices into a calculated economic strategy based on a complex and possibly
endless archaeology.29 Therefore, if the remix nature of dub music can becelebrated for being a cultural glue and creative process, it simultaneously presents itself as the sound of a “society tearing itself apart at theseams.”30

27

See Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944; repr., London: Routledge, 2001),
50–52.
28
Veal, Dub, 78.
29
Ibid., 89.
30
Ibid., 206.

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In the context of remix culture, instead of putting into perspective
the different levels of empowerment and their cost to the community, the idea of an evil, central and easily identifiable source ofcontrol—essentially inherited from the post-war era reaction to central
planning31 —creates the foundation for a deceptive subcultural heroic
discourse. In the same way that the non-trivial symbiosis between
capital and free and open source software communities can be mistaken
as a “black and white dramaturgy of profiteering villains,”32 the copyright
infringing remixer is often portrayed as a beloved liberator, a David
fighting an evil Goliath. Depending on the context, the evil Goliath
becomes a replaceable figure who embodies the record industry, thefilm industry, the publishing industry, and all sorts of media industries.
Of course, there is an urgency to address today’s folly found in many
intellectual property related incidents, from a media industry lobbying
for more punitive actions against the sharing and distribution of copyright material, to appropriation artists and musicians suing each otherad nauseam over sampled materials. However, by articulating theseissues in a such a way that those who prevent the free circulation of
information are systematically impersonated by evil entities,33 the freeculture discourse struggles to depart from a Nietzschean position ofressentiment,34 and this hostility prevents free culture supporters from31

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1: The Spell of Plato (1945; repr.,
London: Routledge, 2006); Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 2:
Hegel and Marx (1945; repr., London: Routledge, 2006).
32
Söderberg, Hacking Capitalism, 31.
33
See Gaylor, RiP!
34
In reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (1913; repr., Mineola:
Dover Publications, 2003), “Good and Evil”, “Good and Bad” (1887).

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fully evaluating the consequences of their propositions.
Finally, the deception of the remix as a satellite of an original, lies in
the artificial influence of the original, that is specifically possible becauseof the locking down of culture by some industries. It is therefore ironic,
and problematic for free culture, to use such a practice to make its point,
and therefore suggest an egalitarian cultural landscape, in which in fact
the stardom driven remix aesthetics they use in their narrative could notexist, and would eventually be replaced by new structures of mediationin which other mechanisms of artificial influence would operate. The
author-centered regime of the information society that Boyle had warned
against35 is therefore not resolved in free culture but only displaced.36
Following the discussion of free cultural techno-legal templates that I
developed throughout this thesis, it should become clear that the questions that matter are not about the potentiality of the free circulationof information, or the novelty of its form, but rather how such information comes into existence, what kind of technological, social, and politicalframeworks permit its access, what networks of software it requires or

35

James Boyle, Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), Chapter 11.
36
This problem of artificial versus egalitarian influence is very concrete: a white label record mashup is more likely to contain a drum sample from Michael Jackson’sThriller than some drumloops produced by the neighbourhood kid and released under a CC license on a sample sharing site such as freesound. Even the few Internet memes that do not appropriate from pop cultural icons, end up at the centreof variations that reinforce their central authority, such as Wojak/Feels Guy/twarz,
the bald man image used in all sorts of situations to express emotional situations
with feels, or trollface, the popularity of which made its author a royalty annuitant. See Know your Meme, “Wojak / Feels Guy | Know Your Meme,” 2010, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wojak-feels-guy; Patrick Klepek, “The Maker of theTrollface Meme Is Counting His Money,” Kotaku, 2015, \url{https://kotaku.com/themaker-of-the-trollface-meme-is-counting-his-money-1696228810}.

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gives rise to, its wider aesthetic inherences and affordances. It should also
become clear how such frameworks influence the groups that inhabit thestructures formed by these templates. Lessig’s RO versus RW file systemapproach to remix and free culture therefore needs to be challenged in its
own metaphorical domain: who owns the file? Where is it located? Why
can it be accessed? Who benefits from reading from or writing to it? Fullpermissions over a small element of a system does not imply complete
control over the latter.

7.2

The Early Days of Mixes Between Operating
Systems and Social Systems

By using the RO versus RW metaphor, Lessig may have underestimated
how relevant such an analogy was for the so-called geeks he was referring
to, in particular those sensible to cultural environmentalism, and whose
political life “have indeed mixed up operating systems and social systems
in ways that are more than metaphorical.”37 In fact, the idea of a computer
environment mixed up with social organisation could already be foundin several early seventies projects.
The 1973 project Community Memory in the San Francisco Bay area
provided three public terminals for a common database, a resource sharing, in which people could read and add information (Figure 7.1). The system, developed by Resource One Inc. a non-profit corporation and one

37

Kelty, Two Bits, 38.

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of few public service computer centres, ended being used beyond its creators expectations: student tips, musician and chess players’ announcements, car pool organisation, restaurant reviews, as well as poems andgraphics.38 People queued and taught each other to use the computer, andaccording to Berkeley Free Speech Movement activist Michael Rossman,the system was “inescapably political,”39 its politics were “concerned withpeople’s power,”40 as anyone could access the network that Rossman considered as the ultimate participatory democracy without central authority, and of public utility.
[I]n this system no person or group can monopolize or otherwise
control people’s access to information. Information-power is fully
decentralized. No editing, no censoring; no central authority to determine who shall know what in what way.
[…][U]sers of the system must take responsibility for their own judgements about its data, supported by whatever judgements other people offer to them through the system.41

What is interesting here, is that even though the system had beenclearly designed and programmed with no ill-intention, it was nevertheless a completely centralised time-sharing system, from which terminals
were used to connect and edit content, a sort of proto-cloud. The users
had to trust that the anonymous access they were given, was truly anonymous and that no extra time stamps and information about which termi-

38

Ken Colstad and Efrem Lipkin, “Community Memory: A Public Information Network,” SIGCAS - Computers & Society 6, no. 4 (1975): 6–7.
39
Michael Rossman, “Implications of Community Memory,” SIGCAS - Computers & Society 6, no. 4 (1975): 7–10.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.

298

Figure 7.1: Community Memory walkthroughPhoto: Mark Szpakowski, 1974, CC BY-SA 2.5

299

nal was used, were also recorded, that the content in the central computer
was not tempered with, and that deleted information was not in fact simply kept. With this example the notion of mixing up becomes indeed
very strong, because the computer system did not merge with a certain
type of social organisation to create a third thing, instead it created a situation in which two realities co-existed. Said differently, the purpose of
the system and its perceived social dimension made the network topology appear radically different from its physical and technological reality,
and made it look like a decentralised and anti-authoritarian network. The
contemporary difficulty to articulate the relationship between social systems and the Internet are rooted in this conundrum. In that sense, andto give a contemporary illustration, the pseudo-anonymity and pseudoprivacy offered by image boards like 2ch, 4chan, or 8chan to name a few,
is nothing but helplessly echoing these questions.42
What is more, this discrepancy, between how a computer system isperceived and how it effectively operates, allows for the materialisationof different social systems. For example, it is perfectly possible to portraya Unix-like operating system as a top-down authoritative hierarchical organisation, that “is deeply indebted to culturally determined notions suchas private property, class membership, and hierarchies of power and ef-

42

With this I mean that the belief of anonymity provided by these platforms is illusory. Regardless of whether one’s post is signed anonymous, it does not guarantee that one’s IP adress and other uniquely identifiable information is not gathered
and tracked from these centralised discussion platforms. For instance, even if justified as a way to prevent abuses, 4chan does not allow access to its service with theanonymous communication software Tor. See 4chan community support LLC, “FAQ
- 4chan,” 2017, https://www.4chan.org/faq#torproxy.

300

fectivity.”43 And yet, the same system has nonetheless spawned a veryrich network of machines built and inhabited around principals of egalitarianism, sharing, decentralisation and cooperation; literally turning thecapitalist-like file system organisation, into a constellation of networked
communities, from hackerspaces,44 to artist-run servers,45 as well as mutual help activist infrastructures.46
To explain how such contradictions have come about I must once again
turn back to the early days of computational culture, which had yet to be
exposed to the division of labour and managements hierarchies,47 simply
due to the lack of a clearly defined computer market or business at thetime, as discussed in Chapter 1. According to American historian Roy
Rosenzweig, Community Memory merges impulses from the radical sixties with the hacker ethic. To make his point, Rosenzweig explains thatthe founders of Community Memory included Lee Felsenstein, who madea living as a computer engineer, whilst being a New Left radical linked
with the Free Speech Movement. Felsenstein was also the son of a district organiser of the Philadelphia Communist Party.48 Felsenstein, who
was also member of the influential hobbyist Homebrew Computer Club,

43

John Unsworth, “Living Inside the (Operating) System: Community in Virtual Reality,” in Computer Networking and Scholarly Communication in the Twenty-FirstCentury University, ed. Teresa M. Harrison and Timothy Stephen (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1996), 142.
44
Contributors to the HackerspacesWiki, “List of Hacker Spaces - Hackerspacewiki:”2017, https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces.
45
Contributors to the Monoskop Wiki, “Art Servers - Monoskop,” 2016, https://monoskop.org/Category:Art_servers.
46
Riseup, “Radical Servers.”
47
Berry, Copy, Rip, Burn, 106.
48
See Roy Rosenzweig, “Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing theHistory of the Internet,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998).

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from which the idea of the personal computer was first articulated, was
one of the many engineers that developed a common hatred for large centralised proprietary mainframes: computer liberationists, in Rosenzweig’s
own words, who were interested in the potential of computers as a vector
of decentralisation, democracy, and freedom.
In parallel of this political impulse, the larger time-sharing operating
systems they opposed also started to provide social software built into
the system, all the while the production and development of software
was increasingly reliant on automation, and had already started to beenvisioned as if it was a factory process.49 Computer hacker Don Hopkins recalls that many of these social programs were available on the
Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), used throughout the seventies
and eighties, such as :UNTALK, :SEND, :REPLY, :INQUIR, :WHOIS, :FINGER,:USERS, :WHOJ, :PEEK, and :OS, all providing the software’s bricks and mor-

tar needed to build a cohesive social structure inside the machine:50

The MIT-AI lab’s ITS machines had several ways of chatting and socializing through the host. You had a lot more awareness of who wason, what they were doing, and what they were into, than most othertime-sharing systems of the time. Many people would stay logged
in all the time, just to be social, read email, send text messages, andchat.51

The communal sense of these groups was best demonstrated with the49

Robert William Bemer, “Machine-Controlled Production Environment,” ed. Peter
Naur and Brian Randell, “SOFTWARE ENGINEERING” Report on a Conference Sponsored by the NATO SCIENCE COMMITTEE, 1968, 55–57.
50
Emails to author, February 17, 2015.
51
Ibid.

302

software shelter and educational environment, that they provided for theunder-privileged living outside of such academic networked walled gardens. For instance, under the name Tourist Policy, the MIT AI Lab allowed
people outside of the lab to apply for accounts, and use the system during
off-hours, in order to learn how to program and access the network.52 But
most importantly, the documents in these systems were made available
with no restrictions whatsoever:And another very social feature was that there was not file protection, and it was considered perfectly acceptable to learn by reading
other user’s files. Deleting and vandalizing wasn’t considered socially acceptable of course, but since there was no challenge to it(and the user community was so small), it wasn’t a big problem.53

If the history of computing and its impact on society would havestopped right here, Lessig’s RO versus RW geek-speak metaphor
may have been strong enough, because it essentially depicts a decontextualised binary situation of file access in the context of communities small enough to have a good understanding and overview ofthe system they participated in. However, as I will now explain, theexponential growth in usage of these systems and the reality of theircontrol mechanisms greatly negates any positive effects that could havecome from using such a simple shortcut to address the free circulationof information.

52
53

Ibid.
Ibid.

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7.3

Policies, Jails, Chroot and Sandboxes

Hopkins also wrote to me that a lot of these network developments andusage were not business-related, and essentially existed in a grey area.
As it turns out, and as computer networks grew, such grey areas became
difficult to maintain in an ad hoc fashion and started to require policing,54 and in some cases more secretive rules. This was the case with
ARPANET, which subcultural activities could not be communicated to theoutside world, in order to avoid the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) losing public and political credibility over their military projects. This led to the infamous 1985 ban of Science Fiction writer
Jerry Pournelle from the network who lost his guest/tourist account, after
mentioning inside stories about the network several times in his columns
for the microcomputer magazine Byte.55 In that sense, if today Usenet,
the Unix powered network that I introduced in the first chapter, is still
remembered rightfully as a unrestricted and poor man’s ARPANET alternative,56 it should not overshadow the fact that the cultures of thetwo networks were equally busy with human to human network communication and social organisation, the difference being that one was
not explicitly allowed to communicate about any one of them. Of course
ARPANET and Usenet are taken as examples here, because of their rel-54

A copy of the rules can be found at MIT AI Lab, “MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy,” n.d.,
http://www.art.net/Studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html.
55
See Don Hopkins, “How Jerry Pournelle Got Kicked Off the ARPANET,” 2000, http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/pourne-smut.html.
56
See Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, “Netizens: On the History and Impact ofUsenet and the Internet,” First Monday 3, no. 7 (1998), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/
index.php/fm/article/view/605.

304

evance in the context of this thesis, and rather important visibility incomputer history; however, it should not be forgotten that the seventies
and eighties proto and early Internet days, saw dozens of important networks initiatives from different origins, research, corporate, cooperativeand so-called metanetworks, which all shared similar social dynamics, tothose exemplified here.57 In the end, all these systems were eventuallyadapted to serve more personal goals and social interests,58 showing the
democratic transformations that could occur within such platforms, nomatter what were their original purpose.59 This is also the reason why,most notably with ARPANET, the adaptive bottom-up communication
systems have often been associated with the counterculture movement,even if their origins belong to different contexts.60
The direct consequence of these transformations became visible in theway the operating systems running these networks were designed. Hereagain, Unix is exemplary to show how the code to organise social activities, and the code to execute on machines are often intertwined. In particular, an important aspect of a Unix-like environment is its organisation
as a hierarchical model, in which everything is represented by files,61 and57

For an extensive survey of such networks, see Quaterman and Hoskins, “Notable
Computer Networks.”
58
Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 104–6.
59
Here, I am essentially paraphrasing and referring to the optimistic analysis of suchtransformation that philosopher Andrew Feenberg made in the context of the French
Minitel, but entirely relevant to the older networks that I just mentioned. See Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 118–20.
60
Scaruffi, A History of Silicon Valley, 1900-2015, Chapter 6.
61Which is to say, that almost every aspects of the system, including devices, are exposed to the file system. Based on the explanation on pipes and input/output redirection presented in Chapter 1, because of this approach, file manipulation tools can also
be used to manipulate hardware devices. For instance the command cat /dev/mem >305arranged in a tree of nested directories. In such a system each file andprocess has a single owner. Users belong to different groups which gives
them different permissions to navigate in some parts of the tree structure,
as well as read, write, and execute files in the system. This is basicallythe technical information on which the RO versus RW metaphor can beunderstood. However this is not all, users are also given a home directory in which they can manage their own files. In multi-user systems,
regardless of whether they are proprietary or not, Unix-like or not, thehome directory is a personal and privileged place in the file system, an
entry point after a successful log in, where a user stores personal files
and programs, but also a place to set configurations and preferences forany given software in the system. Every popular multi-user operating
systems has home directories. The access to the files that can be experienced through many different mediating layers, from graphical userinterfaces (GUI) to command-line interfaces (CLI).62 Last but not least,and sitting on top of the mountain, a superuser, called the root user, possesses all the permissions in the machine, that is full access and control
over every single process and file, including of course the private onesin the users’ home. Even though this is a very quick overview, it alreadyprojects a much richer imaginary than the one found in the RO versus
RW comparison.

/usr/home/merzbow/mymemory will dump the memory of the computer to a file named
mymemory, but cat /dev/mem > /dev/dsp will dump it instead to the soundcard, mak-62

ing audible the machine’s memory.
See Florian Cramer, “$(echo echo) echo $(echo): Command Line Poetics,” in Digital Artist’s Handbook, ed. Marloes de Valk (Lancaster: https://web.archive.org/web/20121222001506/http://digitalartistshandbook.org; Folly, 2007).

306

Depending on the privileges of a user, one can either be trusted totake care of other people’s home and files, or trust that a more privilegeduser will take care of one’s home and files, while not abusing such power.
As it turns out, the nineties success of GNU/Linux is tightly connectedto this structure, as the access to a UNIX operating system running on
affordable hardware such as PC-compatible home computers, gave theavailability for every user to become a local root at a time where UNIXsystems were running on expensive machines, to be accessed remotely asa simple user. The relative nature of exploitation within liberal cultural
production that I was discussing with the remix, is therefore also technologically implemented in these systems where RO and RW permissions—and to be more complete also execute—are isolated in nested structures ofrelative, but not absolute, access. What is more, this construction might
be completely invisible to the user. It is in this particular situation that
the Unix command chroot becomes a much more powerful file system
inspired geek-speak metaphor than RO versus RW.
Added in 1979 to the seventh edition of Bell Labs’ Unix,63 the chroot
program manipulates the way the file system is perceived from a user orprocess perspective. It does so by moving the apparent uppermost directory of the file system to another location, thus preventing the chrooted
users and processes from accessing anything outside of this metaphorical jail. Said differently, the sub-folder one is jailed inside appears as thebase and starting point of all the other folders in the system, while others,

63

Pierre (P.) Lewis, “A Very Brief Look at Unix History,” 1994, ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part6.

307

non-chrooted users and processes, can see one constrained in the spaceand resources one has been allocated. More specifically when discussed
in the context of security, the technique is literally called a chroot jail,64
and in some operating systems like FreeBSD, such technique expanding
upon the chroot idea, is simply called a jail.65 It’s not by accident thatthe act of getting administrator rights on an iPhone, which operates a
Unix based system, is called jail-breaking: the hack is a form of privilege
escalation that aims at liberating phone users from their jail, and subsequently giving them access to the full Unix machine hidden behind their
golden cage GUI. Similarly, in this universe of software class struggle,
on Android phones, also a Unix-like OS, the term rooting refers to theprocess in which the phone user can modify the operating system, so
as to gain superuser permissions: that is becoming root by means of asoftware assisted coup.
Ultimately, the introduction of the chroot program was a tipping point
in which trust and social organisation within operating systems, could
no longer be solved with ad-hoc moral guidelines, and in that sense predating virtualisation and the cloud, that further obfuscated and further
mediated the relationship between users within these systems. Yet oncechrooted, a user or process is given the illusion of complete freedom when
they are in reality sandboxed. The term sandbox is in fact frequently used
to describe all sorts of testing, secure containment, and prototyping prac-

64

David A. Wheeler, “Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO,” 1999, https://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs/.
65
Matteo Riondato, “Chapter 14. Jails,” 2017, https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/
handbook/jails.html.

308

tices that require both the experimental potential offered by such an isolated and malleable place and the illusion they provide to the sandboxed
users or processes. This aspect makes such digital sandboxes similar tophysical box full of sand in a children’s playground, where things canbe invited, bounced, created, abandoned, contained, constrained, interpreted, experimented, censored, populated and grown. Said differently,
it’s a world on its own. Most importantly, it implies the existence of ahigher level structure, and therefore context, which all these actions areultimately nested within. The sandbox is within the playground, that iswithin the park, that is within the city, that is within the state, etc.
So what matters is not so much if access is provided with read or write
permissions, but the conditions and context for such access, both at a
software and legal level. If RO and RW are used to illustrate a simplistic understanding of cultural processes within free culture, using chroots
to talk about these instead, forces us to acknowledge the existence ofcontainment in free culture, a sandbox culture indeed, a model that highlights the duality of the aesthetic of consumer society,66 that I earlier
exemplified with dub music, but that also resonates with the tension between freedom, constraints, and creative territoriality, which I discussed
several times so far in relation to the situations created by the use of freecultural techno-legal templates.

66

Here I make reference to American political theorist Frederic Jameson, who questioned the ability of postmodernism to resist the logic of consumer capitalism. See
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Postmodernism and Its
Discontents: Theories, Practices, ed. Elizabeth Ann Kaplan (1988; repr., London: Verso,1993).

309

Another point that I want to address is that the enclosure of the information commons, to borrow a term from software developer Dmytri
Kleiner,67 is not strictly of a capitalist nature. In this sense I disagreewith an historical creation myth of the Internet as a common and sharedresource, as I have shown that even in the early days of proto-Internet infrastructures, these systems already worked as a series of enclosed commons and shared resources only accessible within specific techno-legal
walled gardens of varying ideologies. Capitalism and the growing commercialisation of the Internet might have enclosed, or more precisely
overlaid their own enclosing structure on top of some already existing
resources but they are in fact essentially focused on mimicking the successful structures that support these resources, not quite enclosing existing commons but in fact facilitating the sandboxing of new commons to
be capitalised upon. This means that the notion of cultural environmentalism from Boyle,68 which draws an analogy between ecological and cultural issues, works only so far with the notion of public domain culturalexpressions and not so much with new forms of digital commons that are
created as part of a logic of cultural sandboxing and user participation,or as Stalder notes, associated to a neoliberal downsizing strategy where
context and embedding did not emerge from a bottom-up process.69

67

Dmytri Kleiner, The Telekommunist Manifesto (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2010), 20.
68Boyle, “A Politics of Intellectual Property.”69
See Felix Stadler, Digital Solidarity (London: Mute, 2013), 31–36.

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Interlude
On several occasions in this thesis, I have shown that whilst it might be instrumental for some to describe free and open source software, as well as
free culture, as movements, it is more precise to decouple the constitutive
techno-legal templates that they offer—and that are all derived from theoriginal free software template—from their usage. By doing so, it allowed
me to first highlight the cultural diversity present in the proto-free culture era, and show how such pluralism decayed when aggregative models
of free culture relying on economics, such as CC, and a deliberative models of free culture relying on ethics, such as Freedom Defined, came into
existence. This decoupling also allowed me to demonstrate, with art inparticular and cultural production in general, that even within the contemporary reduction and rationalisation of the free cultural framework,
as soon as such templates were used, appropriated, or transformed bypractitioners, they all materialised differently and were driven by radically different intentions and purposes.
One consequence of these findings seems to present a new challenge
however. Namely, that such miscommunication and divergence within
the free and open things discourse does not lead to a collapse of these ef311

forts, but instead strengthens it by constant renewal and adaptation to its
environment. Kelty’s intuitive description of free software that is “constantly becoming”1 comes to mind, yet this does not fully explain thisapparent contradiction. This is why in the third part I have momentarily
set aside the discussion on licensing, and discussed instead the copyrightrespectful free cultural proposal where culture is essentially produced
through remix and file sharing, to show that in this liberal model of freecirculation of information, decentralisation favours the creation of opportunistic territories and agents where such access and circulation of information can be profitable. This was my main motivation, to first show thatthe democratic and egalitarian narrative of the RO versus RW metaphor
can be deceptive, as they need to be put in the perspective of broader
consequences from liberal models and commodified approach to culture.
There is of course nothing new in this critique of digital labour,2 however
critiques of exploitation within free and open source projects have nevermanaged to articulate why such systems are nevertheless so durable andpassionately defended by their users. As it turns out, more recent analysis of participatory platforms populated with user generated content has
started to offer other ways to think about such systems, showing in particular that economic transactions are not the only form of exchange occurring in exploitative digital environments.3 Similarly, the question of1

2
3

Christopher Kelty, “There Is No Free Software,” Journal of Peer Production
3 (2013), http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-3-free-software-epistemics/debate/
there-is-no-free-software/.
Terranova, “Free Labor.”
Lasse van den Bosch Christensen, “I, for One, Welcome Our New (Google) Overlords,”
2015, \url{http://networkcultures.org/longform/2015/06/01/i-for-one-welcome-ournew-google-overlords/}.

312participation in free and open source projects cannot be answered absolutely, because of this constant becoming, which can be illustrated, for instance, with changes in the work dynamics within the Linux Kernel which
is now essentially done by employees of companies whose products or
production infrastructure depends on the free software kernel.4 Essentially the political economy of free and open source software is affectedby both the scope and scale of the communities revolving around such
software, and how many active developers are providing the majority ofwork. In that sense, it is not because a barely sustainable one-person
project is licensed in the same way as a project that involves hundredsof “eyeballs,”5 that their mode of production is the same. It seems obvious phrased like this, but it is rarely taken into account when discoursearound free and open source software become overly generalised to forma universal narrative. What can be extrapolated from these remarks isthat commodity fetishism and user manipulation, are not enough to explain globalised arrangements of cultural production in which a few areable to economically benefit from the work of others.
Similarly, awareness of exploitation cannot be taken for granted in environments that have mixed up operating systems with social systems.
Unlike the Jamaican musicians union standing up, even if only symbolically, against version music, it has become increasingly difficult to position and locate oneself in liberal cybernetic constructions of nested homefactory hybrids, in which one activity may or may not be unknowingly

45

Corbet and Kroah-Hartman, “Linux Kernel Development.”
In reference to Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux andOpen Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (1999; repr., Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2001).

313

exploited at a different level. I have argued that this aspect is particularly visible when the context in which data, information, and content
are produced, accessed, and transformed, is taken into account. This is
why in the previous chapter I used the Unix chroot command, to push
to its limits the RO versus RW file permissions metaphor, precisely inorder to start articulating a sandbox model. This allows me to explain
both how free culture is constantly becoming, and why free culture is
not an alternative to dominant means of cultural production, but instead
exemplary of the latter. The somehow neutral sandbox model is also useful to break the discussion about the relationship between artefacts andpolitics,6 or to be more precise, the mixed open and closed model of thesandbox allows me to avoid choosing between a model of control or amodel of contingency, to describe a networked culture in which both arenested within each other, in their most extreme forms and without political agnosticism, albeit sandboxed.
Linking back to free and open source software and free culture in general, the sandbox culture I describe is therefore yet another consequenceof the dual openness of code, legal and software, which I discussed in
the first part of the thesis. Effectively, sandbox culture manifests itself
by the nesting of certain practices through a techno-legal apparatus that,first of all, might not be immediately visible to its participants, and second
will be interpreted differently no matter how explicitly these apparatusespresent themselves. However, because of the ambivalent liberal frame-

6

In reference to Langdon Winner, A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology(1986; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Do Artifacts have Politics?

314

work in which such sandboxes exist, the free circulation of information isstill possible inside and outside of these sandboxes, and benefits greatly
from public and private commitments given the wide range of possible
interpretations, from startup commercial exploitation to anti-capitalist
artworks.
In this final chapter, I will illustrate such a sandbox effect within thePure Data community, and also explain the role of conflict in these systems. I will argue that at a lower level their defusing is a threat to cultural
diversity and pluralism, but at the same time, when conflict occurs it leads
not to the collapse of the sandbox but allows for its extension into other
territories. To show this, I will revisit the notion of forking, of both codeand licenses, and finally, explain how the model of sandbox culture canhelp us think about free and open source dynamics differently, introducing, notably, the concept of software exile.

315

Chapter 8
The Mechanics of Sandbox
Culture8.1

A Day in the Sandbox Life

Pure Data (Pd) is a popular1 cross-platform visual programming language
used by artists, musicians, and designers to create patches. These aregraphical representations of the real-time multimedia processes used forlive performances, installations, audiovisual creations, and more.2 The
software was originally written by US mathematician Miller Puckette,
who had been involved in numerous projects related to electronic music. One of the initial motivations to start working on Pd, back in the1
2

See Romero, FLOSSOFÍA: El Software Libre en el Arte.
Frank Barknecht, “Pure Dataflow - Diving into Pd,” in Digital Artist’s Handbook,ed. Marloes de Valk (Lancaster: https://web.archive.org/web/20121222001506/http://digitalartistshandbook.org; folly, 2007).

316

mid nineties, was to depart from the frustrations he had with his former
employer, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique(IRCAM), which at the time made it very hard for him to disseminate his
research on the software Max which he wrote whilst employed by theinstitute. Therefore one of the other meaning of the Pd acronym is a
purposeful synonym of liberation from the IRCAM intellectual property
sandbox: Public Domain.3 So when Pd is announced in 1996, it is in thisspirit of dissemination of knowledge that Puckette concludes his paper,musing and wondering about the future of Pd, acknowledging the community aspect being as important as the software itself.4 As it turned out
the community that emerged around the software took Pd far beyond its
author’s “wildest dreams.”5 Pd itself was however not distributed as public domain but was released under a modified BSD license, a permissive,
copyfree license that permitted the use of Pd source code within closed
source software, to provide for instance some building blocks of the realtime audio synthesis objects of the software Max/MSP,6 or for the soundengine in the Electronics Arts video game Spore7 .
I use Pd as a case-study in this chapter, because the sandbox it managed
to create has attracted a broad range of people, from academic researchers
to musicians, computer scientists and artists, all very much alert to the

3
4
5
6
7

See Miller Puckette, “Who Owns Our Software? A First-Person Case Study,” Proceedings ISEA 2004, 2004, 200–202.
Miller Puckette, “Pure Data,” Proceedings International Computer Music Conference,
1996, 37–41.
Puckette, “Who Owns Our Software? A First-Person Case Study,” 201.
Cycling ’74, “FAQ: Max 4 « Cycling 74,” 2013, http://cycling74.com/support/faq_
max4/, Where did Max/MSP come from?
Mark Danks, “[PD] Pd in video game Spore,” 2007, http://lists.puredata.info/
pipermail/pd-list/2007-11/056300.html.

317

subject of free software and free culture, due to the openness of Pd’s
source code and its tight links with several free and open source operating systems. It provides, therefore, a very good multicultural context
and meeting point for the different and sometimes incompatible interpretations of the free software techno-legal template discussed in the second
part of the thesis. In particular, I will look at two events that occurred
within the Pd user community which demonstrate what happens in thesesandboxes when such incompatibilities become tangible.

8.1.1

RjDj

RjDj was an iPhone app released in 20088 that promised to change theway music was consumed on mobile devices, by bringing to the masses
a generative and interactive sonic experience, optionally taking advantages of the different sensors present on the Apple phone. It was originally presented as a platform, a new type of music label to some extent,
for composers to contribute and distribute such pieces.9 RjDj was however not developed from scratch, its core component was Pd.
When the RjDj concept was originally introduced to Pd users in July
2008, it was done through one of the founders of the Pd community, in theform of an invitation to join intensive week-end working sessions, whereselected Pd users would be flown over, fed, accommodated, though un-89Günter Geiger, “[PD] [Pd-Announce] Rjdj Released,” 2008, http://lists.puredata.info/
pipermail/pd-announce/2008-10/001314.html.
Email from English computer scientist and sound designer Andy Farnell to author,
May 28, 2013. Farnell was closely involved in the project.

318

paid, to contribute hacking and reflection on a new form of interactive
music for mobile devices, thought to be the next generation of Walkman or MP3 player, in which the consumption of such algorithmic music
would, according to the project description, result in effects similar tothat of taking drugs.10
From the perspective of existing Pd users, RjDj was essentially a mobile Pd patch player. For the Pd developers, and without entering into
technical details that are beyond the scope of this thesis, RjDj was an inspiration and a new impulse to revisit an old desire,11 that was the better
decoupling of the engine part of Pure Data from its user interface, thus
creating a software library that could be used by other applications suchas games, embedded systems, and other audiovisual frameworks. At thetime of the first announcement, it was stated that the project would bebuilt using several open source components, and that most parts of the
project would be released as open source software in return. It was only a
few months later, and after few more week-end working sessions around
Europe, that the definitive form of the project became clear.
RjDj was not yet another artistic use of Pd that emerged from the
Pd community, it was the product of a technology startup (Figure 8.1),
Reality Jockey, Ltd., founded by Austrian entrepreneur Michael Breidenbruecker, who had gained visibility in the early noughties as a co-founderof the music listening tracking service Last.fm, eventually sold to CBS In-

10

Günter Geiger, “[PD] Announcement Kickstart Rj,” 2008, http://lists.puredata.info/
pipermail/pd-list/2008-07/063497.html.
11
See Lee, “Art Unlimited.”

319

teractive for $280 million in 2007,12 during the web 2.0 renaissance of Internet economic bubbles. So while the project got very good mainstream
media attention, it left some members of the Pd community perplexed,seeing their favourite creative sandbox suddenly exposed in mainstream
technology scenes and the tech startup field, while still puzzling about
how exactly these exciting developments and playful hacking sessions
around Pd led, within just three months, to the appearance of a company
planning to sell tens of thousands of $0.99 Pd-derived apps for its sole
profit, while not sharing back much of the iPhone specific source codedeveloped for the project.
To be sure, from a legal perspective the actions of Reality Jockey, Ltd.
were perfectly fine. As stated in the second part of the thesis, commercial exploitation of free software has always been central in the historyof the movement, and a copyfree license makes the release of modified
source code completely optional. This might have come as a surprise forsome,13 but what created the impression of deception was predominantly
the sudden realisation that even a rather niche free cultural practice canbe influenced by global free market dynamics. Said differently, the enthusiasm to build something together created a positive feedback loopof generosity and mutual help within the Pd community—a form of collectivism similar to that experienced during the early experimentationof time-sharing systems—which made some forget to read or ignore the12“Music site Last.fm bought by CBS,” 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/
6701863.stm.
13
See Scott R. Looney, “[PD] rjdj is gone, robotcowboy is coming …” 2012, http://lists.
puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2012-11/098781.html.

320Figure 8.1: RjDj promotion

Screenshot: Reality Jockey Ltd., 2010321

very rules of these sandboxes, literally putting individual and personal
trust and ethics before the way these were encoded at a techno-legal
level. This lack of understanding or interpretation of what constituted
the sandbox was without much consequences, as long as the community
was partly isolated from the rest of the world. With RjDj, the free culturalidea of digital commons became fragmented once what was believed to
be shared was questioned during public discussion where different motivations and interpretations of licensing were confronted.14 Pd, even if
popular in the world of art and electronic music, is neither part of GNU,nor it is a project of the same scale as the Linux kernel. As I explainedin Chapter 7, using the remix as support for the argument, free culture
promotes above all a liberal framework of free circulation of information,in which transformation of information, competition, and opportunism
are intertwined. It is a perfect ground for entrepreneurial developments.
What is more, the situation was further complicated by the mix andinterplay of several licenses. As it turned out, due to conflict between
the Apple developer’s agreement and the GPL,15 it was not possible to
distribute copyleft free software such as GPL software in the iPhone App
Store, which meant that the developers of RjDj made explicit that such
GPL licensed software—this is the case for some popular externals distributed as part or next to Pd—should therefore be either avoided or re-

14

See Marvin Humphrey, “[PD] Keyboard shortcuts for ‘nudge’, ‘done editing’,” 2011,
http://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2011-09/091294.html; See Make art festival, Damian Steward’s RjDj presentation - FAQ with audience, Video archives (Poitiers:
GOTO10, 2008).
15
Brett Smith, “GPL Enforcement in Apple’s App Store,” 2010, https://www.fsf.org/
news/2010-05-app-store-compliance.

322

licensed by their respective authors. Practically speaking, those willingto provide copyleft GPL work instead, would have to assign the copyrightof these files to Reality Jockey. In layman’s terms, it means that the authors willing to participate in the development of some core componentsof the app, must give up their software ownership to the company, who
can then re-license the outcome of such participation the way they want
to incorporate them into an iPhone app.16 Regarding the App Store’s
issue with GPL code, this situation had already prevented multi-author
free software from entering the publishing platform,17 as every individually copyrighted contributions is in fact a right to veto the re-licensing ofsoftware. To avoid such a blocking situation, RjDj defused potential conflicts by imposing a condition upon the acceptance of source code to its
project, which in this case is the choice between: a copyfree’d contribution with original copyright, or a copyleft’ed contribution with copyrighttransfer. It is this particular trick that triggered most criticism outside of
the Pd user community, namely how, it was argued, the GPL was used
as “a firewall to protect commercial interests on a closed platform, while
exploiting the work of a free software community.”18
Such tension was also palpable on the side of those who had joined

16

It is an interesting twist on the GPL copyright assignment strategy championed by
the FSF, and recommended to GNU developers who by giving up their source codeownership to the FSF, also simplify the protection and enforcement of GPL’ed property by the foundation itself. It would be unimaginable that the FSF would use thisposition of power to then dual license the source code, or make it available underother conditions. But technically copyright owners are able to do virtually anything
they want, regardless of who actually wrote the code.
17
Rekkanoryo and MarkDoliner, “Why Is There No Version of Pidgin for IOS in the
App Store?” 2013, https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhyNoiOSVersion.
18
Alex McLean, “Alex McLean | The iPhone and toilet paper freedom,” 2009, http://yaxu.org/the-iphone-and-toilet-paper-freedom/.

323

the RjDj project. Some active Pd developers and contributors who were
essentially doing voluntary work within the Pd community, or integrating it as part of diverse university research and academic positions, hadbeen offered paid work via other developers already involved, thereby
also helping legitimise the product within the Pd community. Australian
freelance software developer Chris McCormick recalls: “the RjDj thing
seemed like it would be pretty wild and the pay was good so I went withthat.”19 But as the product was further developed, the company’s agenda
seemed to contradict its originally advertised openness and respect towards the Pd community. One of the RjDj developers, French music signal processing specialist and Debian maintainer Paul Brossier, who, at
the time had contributed foundation work on the audio engine and GUI,
told me that the requests from Breidenbruecker to remove the license andcopyright notice of Pure Data to further close the project was “one drop
too much.”20 As a result of this conflict the developer left the project. Another developer, who wished to remain anonymous, also shared with me
how he felt at the time:
I was very ambivalent. Always cheerful and enthusiastic about theteam, the technical aspects of the project and its potential, but always on edge and suspicious. […] There are last-minute meetings
that some people do not get to hear about because they “are only
technicians”. Suits begin to appear that nobody knows. We hear
about “great opportunities” which fortunately were raised, but how“compromises will have to be made.” And the good people who believe in something more than money, smell the wind and start leaving. This was turning point for me because in it I saw a lot of myfears about the driving of a tech startup come true. The crisis and

19
20

Email to author, May 31, 2013.
Email to author, June 4, 2013.

324

growing-up, for me, was to see that these things are how it works
for this kind of people and are not reflections of my own cynicism
or paranoia. Many companies use the idealism of young people as aweakness. Interest in openness, software freedom, innovation, passionate creativity exist as long as they are useful to recruit and train
the team. Once the company starts making business transactions
all that goes out the window.21

However, as I suggested in the introduction, I do not want to fall intoa one-dimensional interpretation of such events. There is not just one
system of transaction in place and they are not all related to the questionsof capital or ethics. For example, returning to McCormick’s experience,
the interpretation of the process is much more nuanced and opens up
new possibilities of further emancipation:[…] I think I always knew it was a proprietary company and I was
paid to do a job within the confines of that. I am not even sure it’s accurate to say that it was any less transparent than other proprietarycompanies, especially startup companies which are notoriously secretive. In the end I was happy that we got some things released under Free Software licenses let alone the whole stack. Actually I think
if you look at other startups in the music space, we were releasing a
lot more stuff as Free Software than others did, so I feel good about
that. Some of it is even in use today and it really inspired some coolprojects that wouldn’t have happened without RjDj.
If I had have felt like we were actively violating any Free Software
licenses that would have been a different thing, but I felt like myself
and a couple of other people in the company worked hard to makesure that wasn’t happening[.]22

What is more, the sandboxing effect also happened at a level that wasinvisible and not suspected inside the Pd sandbox, that is to say, RjDj

21
22

Email to author, June 1, 2013.
Email to author, May 31, 2013.

325

was also established within Apple’s sandbox. The latter’s growing visibility experienced by the startup, and its influence on indirectly dictating
the technical and legal form and conditions linking with the Pd community, eventually dragged the remaining energy out of the project.23 And
finally, in October 2012, the RjDj app was removed from the App Store.
But as McCormick hinted, as much the whole RjDj development was perceived as a deceptive process by some, the free circulation of information across sandboxes also led to new opportunities that arose during thedevelopment of the app. After the combination of several efforts, mostnotably on the Android platform, the project libpd—a library based on
Pd’s source code and which allows the development of standalone applications using Pd as sound engine—was released towards the end of 2010,and had also found its way into the iPhone tool-kit of the RjDj developers when the project was still running.24 In February 2012, the website
libpd.cc was launched next to a book on the topic.25 A link to a web
forum, distinct from the existing Pd mailing list and bulletin boards community, was provided early on for discussions regarding the use of thislibrary. A new sandbox was born, which tried to present itself in the least
conflicting way possible:

libpd is Pure Data. It is not a fork of Pure Data, not a different flavourof Pure Data. It is simply a way of using Pd in a new way thatcan be more convenient and allows compatibility with mobile app
development, game development, embedding into sophisticated 3D

23

Email to author from the developer wishing to remain anonymous, June 1, 2013.
Peter Brinkmann et al., “Embedding Pure Data with Libpd,” Proceedings Pure Data
Convention, 2011.
25
Peter Brinkmann, Making Musical Apps (Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2012).
24

326

visualization tools, and lots of other applications. As such, it adds
to Pd, without taking away anything from Pd Vanilla’s DSP core.
It has the same license as Pd, too. It is every bit as free and open
source as Pd. As such, the project is hugely indebted to the entire
Pd community, and to Pd’s original creator, Miller Puckette. Thoseof us working with libpd have done so because we’re excited to see
Pd patches running in more places than ever before, doing things
they’ve never done before, and we trust you’re just getting started.26

From a software perspective, the RjDj project is far from being simply
anecdotal, as it provided new perspectives and horizons for Pd users anddevelopers, and finally unified efforts around the creation of one librarythat can expand Pd’s territory to other sandboxes. Alongside this, inthe recent years the project inspired new derivative works, frameworks,
players, apps, whether closed or open, or in some sort of legal limbo.
It also provided new commercial opportunities for Reality Jockey Ltd.,
that, after retiring the RjDj app, kept on using parts of the RjDj softwarein other commercial apps,27 a practice that was already notably experimented with by the company in 2011 with the release of a promotionalapp for the 2010 science fiction film Inception. In sum, the whole story
arguably mainly had an effect on the people who witnessed and participated in this process, and it is unclear how this will transform the social
dynamics around Pd in the long term, now that the sandbox participants
have seen the cracks in the wall, and witnessed how the source code ofan artistic iPhone app can be turned into a hub for different opinions,
ideologies, philosophies, economic imperatives, and practices to collide,
not always in a pleasant way.

26
27

Peter Kirn, “Libpd » About,” 2012, http://libpd.cc/about/.
Email to author from Farnell, May 28, 2013.

327

8.1.2

Fuck the System

In Chapter 7 I argued that the mix up between social systems and operating systems was not just an arbitrary overlap or accident. Thus behind
the RO versus RW cultural dichotomy of Lessig, using file system permissions as an analogy to describe cultural processes, I have briefly explainedthat computer operating systems and their networking can provide different models of social organisation, with different levels of transparency
and policing, from small-scale emulations of property-less pseudo-secretsocieties to panopticonesque chroot jails. This led me to use the term
sandbox to refer to these different architectures that have increasingly
relied on techno-legal templates, and most notably in the context of thistext, those derived from free and open source software licensing. If thisapproach allowed me to create a counter argument—by simply looking
at the ways cultural expressions are produced and not just accessed—tothe trivial pro free culture binary RO versus RW, I now want to discuss
the refusal to engage with these sandboxes and their techno-legal fabric,
when they create a conflict of belief, values, or ideas.
To do so, in this section I will examine the work from French noiseand experimental musician and computer programmer Yves Degoyon.28
If some are busy pondering about file permissions, Degoyon is more infavour of simply getting rid of the files and the whole OS at the sametime. This is the basis for his performance rm -rf /* :: f*** the system—or

28

The text from this subsection is based on a semi-structured email interview with
Degoyon, that took place during April 2015 and March 2016.

328

/bin/rm -rf /* :: f*** the system—in which the musician performs using an
audiovisual noise generating Pd patch, while at the same time opening up
a terminal on his computer and runs the command /bin/rm -rvf /*, thatwill in effect recursively force-remove every file and directory under theroot file system, while the names and paths of said files and directories
are printed on the terminal of his GNU/Linux distro. Eventually with thefile system emptied and only a handful of programs and data left in the
RAM of the machine, the computer crashes, sometimes with unexpectedbehaviour, and with it ends the performance.
Degoyon told me that the work is mainly an experiment in chaos andthe instability of computer systems. However he also admits that the title hints obviously towards a double meaning, and the action that needs
to be taken to get rid of a system before it alienates you. Degoyon grewup listening to post-punk bands such as Wire, Gang of Four, and This
Heat, which while having widened the cultural scope of punk, have doneso, according to Degoyon, notably through the generalisation of punk’s
DIY spirit. Here the punk connection can be deceptive, because the titleof the performance is to be understood differently from the way English
punk singer Johnny Rotten claimed to have fucked up the system, when
he was part, with other proto punks and early punks, of what has been
described as a working class Bohemia.29 Instead, a more abiding connection would be the 1967 pamphlet Fuck the System by American politicaland social activist Abbie Hoffman, a text filled with tips and advice to29

Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock (London: Constable,
1987), 266.

329

organise and survive in the “city jungle” and the development of a “freer
more humanistic” society.30 So it should not be surprising that in his approach, Degoyon feels more connected to the early days of British collective and arnarcho-punk band Crass, which he often quoted and referred
to during heated mailing list discussions, where the link to avant-garde
art and anarchist political movements was not a trivial appropriation as
it was in other early punk bands, but was more seriously explored via direct action and zine publishing, so as to advocate animal rights, anti-war,
anti-consumerism, vegetarianism, environmentalism and feminism.31
When Degoyon started to use and write free software, it is throughthis art punk anarchist inspiration that he engaged with this particular
digital form of knowledge sharing. During our exchange, he refereed to
the Spanish video collective R23,32 founded by artist and computer scientist Lluis Gomez i Bigorda, as an example of introducing such elements
into media art practices. Degoyon contributed to R23 DIY streaming media projects and network mapping in the early noughties, and admitted
to enjoying the perturbation generated with the introduction of “somespirit of activism in the polished world of media art,”33 at a time where30

The text also paved the way for a better known work by Hoffman, the 1971 Steal
this Book, which I mentioned in Chapter 2 in connection to open design and DIY.
Of course Hoffman is not the only connection to be made here. Sixties anarchist
guerrilla street theatre group the Diggers were early explorers of ideas of anonymity,
freedom of association, and societies free from private property, using a wide rangeof practices from direct action and art happenings, to the publication of leaflets andmanifestos. See Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio : A Life Played for Keeps (1972; repr.,
New York: New York Review Books, 2008).
31
See Johan Kugelberg, In All Our Decadence People Die: An Exhibition of Fanzines
Presented to Crass Between 1976 and 1984 (New York: Boo-Hooray, 2011).
32
R23.cc, “r23.cc,” 2005, https://web.archive.org/web/20050312155147/http://r23.cc/
community/.
33
Email to author, April 8, 2015.

330

the mix of free software and art offered a self-organised and decentralised
alternative to artistic media labs.34 However, what was first perceived as
an ideological alignment between Degoyon’s beliefs and the technological environment he was contributing to, unfortunately quickly turned
into something very illustrative of the alienation expressed in his performance.
One of the software project actively developed by Degoyon at the time
was PiDiP,35 which stands for PiDiP is Definitively into Pieces, a BSDstyle licensed Pd external that brings extra video processing capabilities
and builds upon the GPL’ed Pure Data Packets (PDP) Pd video processing objects by Belgian software and hardware developer Tom Schouten,36
and also sharing some code with GPL’ed real-time video effect software
EffecTV, originally developed by Japanese programmer Kentaro Fukuchi.
But two events made Degoyon question the relationship between his political views and free and open source software production. He explained
to me that the first event was a conversation with a CCTV company in2004, that was present in an international meeting of activists in Switzerland, and that was interested in using free software technology for motion
detection. The second event occurred at a free software meeting in Brazil
in 2005, where representatives from the army were assessing the viability of using free software in their surveillance systems. Degoyon told me

34

See Annet Dekker, Angela Plohman and Irma Földényi, “Interview with Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk,” in A Blueprint for a Lab of the Future,
ed. Angela Plohman (Eindhoven: Baltan Laboratories, 2011).
35
See Yves Degoyon, “PiDiP Is Definitely in Pieces,” 2011, http://ydegoyon.free.fr/pidip.
html.
36
Tom Schouten, “Untitled Page,” 2012, http://zwizwa.be/pdp/.

331

that he obviously could not accept that, and was the reason he first first
decided to add a clause to his BSD-style license “NOT FOR MILITARY OR
REPRESSIVE USE ‼!”, and later on take a more radical step by releasing
PiDiP under his own license in 2010:
to cut with all legal blah-blah, this license will be made short.
the code published here can be studied, modified, used by anyone
that provides all the original credits and sources in derivative
projects.
there are restrictions on its use, it cannot be used for :• military amd/or repressive use• commercial installations and products• any project that promotes : racism, nationalism, xenophobia,
sexism, homophobia, religious hatred or missionarism .. ( expandable list)
this is not a standard license.
sevy & authors.37

These two changes in PiDiP’s licensing terms are an interesting caseof fucking up the sandboxing system. Degoyon, who told me he hadoriginally chosen a copyfree38 BSD style license because it was like Pd’s
own license, was in fact releasing a software containing an assortmentof code from copyleft’ed EffecTV, bits and bytes from other sources andcollaborations, and also his own code written from scratch. By initiallyreleasing PiDiP with a non-copyleft non-GPL compatible license and yet
using some copyleft’ed parts, he was breaking the GPL and misusing the37

LICENSE.txt file from the PiDiP CVS repository, revision 1.1.1.1, commitid:
MR5avkuVSyEPgbZ, 2010-12-06 06:31:45. The typo will be fixed with commit
aOzDtQZu7yTgVL9v, in February 2011 for version 1.2.
38
For an an explanation on copyfree licensing see Chapter 5, The Double Misunderstanding with Copyleft.

332

copyright of others. A GPL-respectful way to publish PiDiP should havebeen for instance either under the GPL, or as two collections of source
files, the GPL modified ones under the GPL and the others under the
BSD style license or else, assuming Degoyon did not use other chunks ofsource code licensed differently, in which case further fragmentation of
the software would have been necessary in case of license incompatibilities. But Degoyon cared little about that fact and in 2006 stated on thePd mailing list, in a very art punk anarchist way, that people should notforget that PiDiP contributors like to “confuse lawyers and boring people
first.”39 Funnily enough, the original mis-licensing—when PiDiP was distributed as BSD yet including GPL code from EffecTV—did not preventthe software to be successfully validated by FSF employees and listed in2003 by the FSF directory with other useful free sofware—as I discussed
earlier in Part 2—which shows that traceability and transparency in free
and open source software has its limits.
Regardless of Degoyon’s little interest in respecting licensing terms—asituation which shows some ressemblance with Stallman’s early EMACS
days where code circulation was more important for the hacker than diligent respect of copyright laws40 —was an important figure of the Pd community, whose software was used by several artists and packaged or distributed by other developers. However, this started to change in 2005
when the licensing issue was brought up in the Pd mailing lists. The issue dragged on for years with extremely heated discussions on the user

39

Yves Degoyon, “[PD-Ot] Pidip Inherits Gnu Gpl from Effectv,” 2006, https://lists.
puredata.info/pipermail/pd-ot/2006-01/001377.html.
40
See Part 1.

333and developer lists of the software. Degoyon’s contributions to the debate tended to add oil to the fire as he explicitly grounded his refusal
to change his license based on political motivations—with even more oilpoured when he started to change the BSD license into a non-copyfree
non-military license—whereas those asking him to conform acted as asort of neighbourhood watch system, trying to enforce the cyber constitution of the Pd sandbox. I use the words neighbourhood watch here,
because in fact only Kentaro Fukushi, and possibly other contributors ofEffecTV, were the ones who could require their licensing to be enforced.
As it turned out, Degoyon and Fukushi had already met on several occasions previously, and the EffecTV author knew of PiDiP and appreciatedthe fact that his work had been ported to Pd. His silence on the mislicensing matter may have seemed to indicate he cared little about the potential licensing problem with PiDiP. However, as Degoyon was further
pushed in to a corner within the Pd community, which in turn led to theradicalisation of his licensing strategy, PiDiP started to break more constitutive mechanisms of other sandboxes, such as operating systems like
Debian, or free and open source software hosts like SourceForge. Simply put, by means of TOS, social contracts, or other usage agreements,
these platforms and operating systems can implement their own definition of software freedom, which help decide which licenses they allow,
ultimately shaping the software culture they distribute. PiDiP’s new license was incompatible with many of such definitions. Eventually PiDiP
became, in 2010, a software non grata removed from the Pd repositories

334

and distributions.41 At time of writing, PiDiP, the impossible copypunk
source code, only exists in a limbo of various repositories outside anddisconnected from the Pd community, but it is still listed in the EffecTV
project links as well as in the FSF free software directory.
Within the free cultural techno-legal template, the practice and intention that led to the creation of PiDiP, a software that grew organicallyfrom the encounter of the author with other artists and developers—andthe source code they wrote, notably within the projects of the R23
collective—became incompatible with its technical and legal framework.
It challenged the definition of freedom carried by the sandbox it wasborn within, and illustrated the non-trivial interaction between thechanges through the years of an author’s thoughts, the fluidity of thedigital medium his creation was written in, and the rigidity of its legal
framework. In such a situation, PiDiP, published by a rather proud
outlaw,42 nonetheless found a deadlock and the execution of its legal
instructions became eventually incompatible within the system it wasdeveloping, as opposed to its perfectly running software instructions.
This example shows once again the strength of the techno-legal template,and its dual level of interpretation by machines, and humans, initiallydiscussed in Chapter 1. To be sure, Degoyon’s stand should not be
marginalised or neglected because it was the response of an artist in
the context of a niche software community. In fact, similar responses

41This removal was effective with commit r14502 from the Pure Data SVN code repository, which motivated Degoyon to start hosting his own public code repository on
giss.tv and change the license even more, as discussed previously.
42
In reference to Yves Degoyon, “[PD] Percolate,” 2007, https://lists.puredata.info/
pipermail/pd-list/2007-03/047953.html.

335

and critiques towards free and open source projects have also been
articulated notably by Felix von Leitner, a German IT security expert
and ex-member of the Chaos Computer Club:This is what we get when our free software licenses lacka ‘not for military purposes’ clause: DARPA presents a
weapon control system on the basis of Android tablets http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2015/04/06.aspx. Linux is
now killing people.43

More recently, in 2015, one of von Leitner’s own GPL licensed free software projects, dietlibc, a popular lightweight C standard library,44 wasshown to have been used in products sold by Hacking Team, the ItalianInformation Technology company specialised in providing corporations
and governments with intrusion and surveillance technology. Next tothe breach of the GPL copyleft, this situation further prompted Leitner tocall for a NOMIL/NOINTL license, and started to put in motion a modification of the AGPLv3 as a foundation for such a license.45 von Leitner’s
effort is not singular, and there has been in the past several projects that
became non-free and non-open source software, in spite of the availability of the source code, simply because they used statements,46 or licensing techniques that exclude military usage like the Peaceful Open Source

43‘Das haben wir jetzt davon, dass wir in unseren freie-Software-Lizenzen keine“nicht für militärische Anwendung”-Klausel haben: DARPA präsentiert ein Waffensteuerung auf Basis von Android-Tablets. Linux tötet jetzt Menschen.’ Translation Florian Cramer. Felix von Leitner, “Fefes Blog,” 2015, https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=abda600a.
44
Felix von Leitner, “diet libc - a libc optimized for small size,” 2016, https://www.fefe.
de/dietlibc/.
45
Felix von Leitner, “Fefes Blog,” 2015, https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=ab645846.
46
See Roedy Green, “Non-Military Use Only,” 2017, http://mindprod.com/contact/
nonmil.html.

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License.47
PiDiP, whose name indeed announced its demise, precisely shows
what happens when the license as community law take over the values it
was thought to be defending. Accepting to use a specific license against
one’s own beliefs brings the risk of creating cognitive dissonance,
and Degoyon avoided this by putting his beliefs before the sandbox’s
rules when he noticed the contradiction created by the situation. But
even though passion and affects are crucial in creating allegiance todemocratic values,48 they must be removed from the rationalised modelof free culture for the latter to operate smoothly, and could explain whysome participants of free and open source projects present their work
detached from political intentions.49 This is not just an issue of social
dynamics within small communities, but it is also visible in the way
the infrastructures that support free culture operate. To give a shortexample, in 2009, the jsmin-php software was banned from Google Codebecause the software had inherited the license of jsmin.c it was based on,a license that was a modified version of the free and open source software
MIT license. The modification was one line stating “The Software shallbe used for Good, not Evil”, which made the software non-free and gave
the “Don’t be evil” company a reason to exclude the code from its free
and open source software hosting platform.50 Interestingly enough, and47

Linkesh Diwan, “Peaceful Open Source License,” 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20140924010836/http://wiseearthpublishers.com/sites/wiseearthpublishers.com/
files/PeacefulOSL.txt.
48
Mouffe, “For an Agonistic Model of Democracy (2000),” 199–200.
49
Coleman, “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast.”
50
See Ryan Grove, “JSMin isn’t welcome on Google Code,” 2009, http://wonko.com/337

linking back to my earlier neighbourhood watch analogy, Google did
not scan their repository for non-compliant licenses, they were simply
informed by another user in the main discussion forum of the Google
Code virtual community.51
As shown with these examples, there is only a thin balance between
the free software Gemeinschaft emulation, and the implementation of acyber disciplinary society. Free culture in this context is far from being
the liberating and pluralistic tool it seemed to be, or to be more precise
and to refer to the first part of this thesis, I have shown with this example
that the aggregative and deliberative democratic models of free culture,
have risen at the cost of antagonism and radicalisation of cultural practices, by limiting rapid cycles of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic efforts, that used to be more prominent during the chaotic era of proto-free
culture. As a result, free culture sandboxes become absolute democracies in which not only artists such as Degoyon, but any participant infact, are effectively forbidden “to engage with a multiplicity of agonistic
democratic struggles to transform the existing hegemonic order,”52 because their software becomes a threat to a public space that according to
the defined free culture can only exist as a consensual thing, and that isdefined by certain parameters that rely on the exclusion of others.

post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code.
Adam Goode, “jsmin-php not open source,” 2009, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-code-hosting/F8P68oKPXA8.
52
Mouffe, “Cultural Workers as Organic Intellectuals (2008),” 215.
51

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8.2

Fork the System

Next to complete obedience or complete resistance, one particular sideeffect of a free cultural mechanism that promotes the circulation of information over the context of its production and usage, allows a third
approach to engage with sandbox dynamics: forking.
Forking can be described as the process by which the source code of apiece of software can be modified, so as to make, for instance, new software integrating modifications, minor or major, that would not have been
accepted by the author(s) and community from which the fork stemmed,
or simply to explore transformations unforeseen by the original authorsof a work.53 The divergence of source code and the proliferation of concurrent versions of the same software is not specific to free and open
source software and became an important aspect of source code sharing
in the early days of UNIX , as it was discussed in Chapter 1. It has also
been argued that copyleft development could either deter forking motivated by competition, and allow merging back at a later stage if forking
occurs.54 However, the rationalisation of source code sharing with thecreation of free and open source software licenses, can also be interpreted
as taking a radical path towards divergence, a “right to fork,”55 regardlessif open forms of developments are made mandatory as with copyleft li-

53

For a general explanation regarding forking in free and open source software culture,some historical references, and a case study with the Debian and Ubuntu operating
systems, see Benjamin Mako Hill, “To Fork or Not to Fork: Lessons from Ubuntu andDebian,” 2005, https://mako.cc/writing/to_fork_or_not_to_fork.html.
54
Andrew M. St Laurent, Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing (Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2004), 171–73.
55
Weber, The Success of Open Source, 159.

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censes. In that sense license-assisted forking can be seen more as a liberal
remix-culture-oriented free culture approach, than a community-binding
copyleft mechanism. Both are in fact different materialisations of therules of software freedom. Due to the difference of context in which suchmaterialisation occurs—acquiring existing work versus contributing toexisting work—forking originally had as a result, a very bad reputation.
Yet, it has risen today to become a very important mechanism central in
the writing of free and open source software, in the age of connected machines and users, and an important component in sandbox dynamics andunderlying mechanics of the constant becoming in free and open source
software communities.
Before elaborating on the details of such a mechanism—notably withthe software git that I will introduce later in this section—I must first
briefly explain how forking has co-evolved with the different generationsof tools which have facilitated the writing of software. What is interesting in this co-evolution is the apparent contradiction between the desire
to develop a very liberal approach to producing and distributing software,
but done so through the very techno-legal means and methods that will
later be feared by those defending such a liberal system. In particular,
libertarian computer programmer Eric S. Raymond, who famously articulated the negative consequences of forking:Nothing prevents half a dozen different people from taking any
given open-source product (such as, say the Free Software Foundations’s GCC C compiler), duplicating the sources, running off withthem in different evolutionary directions, but all claiming to be theproduct.
This kind of divergence is called a fork. The most important characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that cannot

340later exchange code, splitting the potential developer community.56

Here it becomes clear that the fork is more than a threat to these communities, it is a threat to the mechanism of reciprocity which is central
to the gift economy,57 and which inspired Raymond to describe free andopen source software community as gift culture.58 Of course, as I explained previously in this third part, and regardless of the desires andmechanisms of reciprocity put in place, it is to be expected that a system deeply inspired by classic liberal dynamics will create competition
between different actors trying to maximise profit, whatever this profit
is, either financial or based on the free circulating information they canaccess to. In that sense, forking can become a tool to accelerate competition. Raymond however seems to preemptively defuse the problem byarguing that there is a discrepancy between what he calls the yield implied by free and open source licenses, which according to him is only use,
and the yield of participation in the production of free and open source
software that is “peer repute in the gift culture of hackers, with all thesecondary gains and side-effects that implies.”59
In this context indeed, forks are therefore negative for the community
as they “tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and acrimony
between the successor groups over issues of legitimacy, succession, anddesign direction.”60 The fork here is seen as a form of failure to reach con-

56

Eric S. Raymond, “Homesteading the Noosphere,” First Monday 3, no. 10 (1998), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/621/542.
57
Mauss, The Gift.
58
Raymond, “Homesteading the Noosphere.”
59
Ibid.
60
Eric S. Raymond and Guy L. Steele, “THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 4.2.2,” 2000, http:341

sensus around a common techno-legal authority, that should in theory
satisfy all the inhabitants of the sandbox. But given its political power,
the threat of forking could also work as part of a strategy to influence thedirection of a project, and has been described as similar to a “ ‘vote of no
confidence’ in a parliament,”61 a convenient way to work around the effective vote-less rough consensus found in some of these communities.62
Therefore in the early days of free and open source software development, the fear of forking may have worked as a glue to assemble andmaintain large software community sandboxes, where the desire for liberal and libertarian structures was nuanced by the necessity to maintaincohesion in these world of techno-legal social systems, leading to a sortof macro liberalism. Another account is to note that in certain cases, thetrademarking and other means of protecting the name of a project hashelped discourage the creation of competing projects.63 Lastly, it wasargued that the trading aspect of free and open source software development shared resemblance with iterated games around reputation, andthus the fear of forking introduces a reputation risk.64 Said differently, it
may have not been the threat of schism, name protection, or reputation,that limited the proliferation of radical software freedom, that is forking, but simply that the act of forking took significantly more effort thansolving issues within an existing community. However, another expla-//catb.org/jargon/oldversions/jarg422.txt, forked entry.
David A. Wheeler, “Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or
FOSS)? Look at the Numbers!” 2015, https://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html#
forking.
62
Stadler, Digital Solidarity, 39.
63
Andrew M. St Laurent, Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing, 173.
64
Weber, The Success of Open Source, 159.
61

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nation could simply be that the development platforms available at thetime were simply not flexible enough to facilitate forking, therefore prevented a more radical take on software freedom and the free circulationof information.
In the history of software engineering, tools such as version control
systems (VCS), also known as revision control and source control, haveallowed developers to keep track of changes in software. When Marc J.
Rochkind started research on VCS in 1972 at Bell Labs with the project
Source Code Control System (SCCS),65 running both on IBM 370 OS and
PDP 11 UNIX, the idea to approach software development to reflect on thecontinuous and concurrent nature of software engineering was deemedradical,66 but it was not entirely new, because IBM had already been working on a way to facilitate and control software engineering with their 1968
CLEAR-CASTER system—the combination of the Controlled Library Environment and Resources (CLEAR) and the Computer Assisted System
for Total Effort Reduction (CASTER)—so as to provide a unified programming development support system and batch processing system. In the
CLEAR-CASTER system, changes to source were notably detached fromthe actual source text to facilitate the keeping track of changes as well as
providing contextual documentation for the software.67 These VCS andothers from the first generation, to borrow from Raymond’s classification

65

Marc J. Rochkind, “The Source Code Control System,” IEEE Transactions on Software
Engineering 1, no. 4 (1975): 369.
66
Ibid., 368.
67
John N. Buxton and Brian Randell, “Software Engineering Techniques,” Report on aconference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Rome, 1969 (NATO Science
Committee, 1970), 5.3 Support Software for Large Systems.

343

of such tools,68 worked by sharing the same file system, but with the riseof computer networks and remote access to computational facilities, VCS
eventually evolved to adopt a client-server model. This shift occured with
the Unix tool Revision Control System (RCS) created in 1982 by German
computer scientist Walter F. Tichy,69 first following a local data model,
the functionality of which was enhanced in 1985 by Dutch computer scientist Dick Grune70 so as to facilitate collaboration across several users.
Grune’s work eventually led to the creation of the Concurrent Versions
System (CVS), that existed, not without some irony, as two concurrent
projects.71
As part of a client-server VCS like CVS, or its successor subversion(SVN) introduced in 2000 to improve some of the flaws of CVS,72 thecode repository is commonly served from a single machine, the server,that keeps track of all the changes in the source code. For instance, a programmer can use a VCS client software to retrieve changes made by otherprogrammers and which are stored remotely on a machine running the
VCS server software that serves and tracks changes in the central repository. The programmer can then make further modifications locally on
their personal machine, and eventually commit changes to the central
repository, granted they are allowed to do so by the server. It is not

68

Eric S. Raymond, “Understanding Version-Control Systems (DRAFT),” 2008, http://
www.catb.org/esr/writings/version-control/version-control.html.
69
Walter F. Tichy, “RCS—a System for Version Control,” Software: Practice and Experience 15, no.7 (1985): 637–54.
70
Dick Grune, “The relation between my CVS, Brian Berliner’s cvs and GNU CVS,”
1992, https://dickgrune.com/Programs/CVS.orig/CVS_BB_and_GNU.
71
Ibid.
72
Michael Pilato, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, Version Control with Subversion (2002; repr., Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2008), xiii–xiv.

344difficult to see that there is a lack of balance in this control structure because developers can be denied access to the central repository. But it
also means, that getting access to the whole database, the history of the
project, is not trivial because all of this is handled on the server side.
On the other hand, because of this gated and centralised architecture, requesting access to a project VCS, to be trusted with such access, can only
be done by socially interacting with the community or group working
on the software. Changes to the system are therefore also scrutinised
and discussed within these same groups and communities, as access tothe main VCS repository of a project does not imply anything can becommitted. But it is important to note that once again, those in chargeof writing software within such environments are not necessarily thoseable to change and modify such software environments, and the writingof software can be done following many different participatory and managerial models, often referred to as governance models within free andopen source software management discussions.73
In 2005 Scottish artist, writer, and programmer Simon Yuill introduced
the concept and framework of Social Versioning Systems (SVS), used in
his social simulation game spring_alpha,74 where players are invited totake part in an uprising to form an alternative society to that of the capitalist, normalising and disciplinary world they’ve lived in so far. Next
to traditional game mechanics derived from interactive fiction and open-

73

Ross Gardler and Gabriel Hanganu, “Governance Models,” 2013, http://oss-watch.ac.
uk/resources/governancemodels.
74
Simon Yuill, “SVS [about],” 2006, http://www.spring-alpha.org/svs/index.php?
content=about.

345

ended world simulation, the novelty of spring_alpha is that players wereable to re-write the code that runs the simulated world,75 a process bothfacilitated and tracked by SVS. SVS and spring_apha are both inspiredby, and illustrate well, the constitutive and social dimension of the free
software techno-legal templates that lead to the creation of sandboxes,
whereby rules can be theoretically challenged and modified following
different models of participation. One aspect of SVS in particular was
prompted at the time by the growing availability of tools to monitor,
visualise and further track changes within version control code repositories, as well as quantify and contextualise them. Looking back today
at the way the tracking tool provided by SVS pushed the idea of VCS asa glue to bridge social systems with their techno-legal frameworks, it isstriking to see how some of the principles provided by this critical art
and research project announced, coincidentally, an age in which VCS are
nowadays combined and interleaved with discretised and “computableorderings,”76 not however to reprogram the social systems they’re used
in—and this is the key difference—but rather to further order and control
software work and dominant modes of production, as best exemplified
with the social-coding platform GitHub.77
Indeed, if Yuill’s ideas were rooted in the understanding that the moral
and social aspects of work were not solely determined by technology,
as Coleman explained with her work on free software communities as

75

Ibid.
Quinn DuPont and Yuri Takhteyev, “Ordering Space: Alternative Views of ICT and
Geography,” First Monday 21, no. 8 (2016), http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/
article/view/6724/5603.
77
Ibid.
76

346

high-tech guilds,78 and therefore whose dynamics had the potential to beinternally contested and challenged with very rare occasions of forking,this was not without counting on two aspects. The first is as I describedearlier with the two Pd examples, which showed that the immutabilityof the legal fabric of these sandboxes in practice greatly limits counterhegemonic efforts. But most importantly here, the second aspect is thatsuch analysis and work were highly dependent on the state of all thesesoftware frameworks that helped manage and control software production. If client-sever models of version control, for instance, introduced
a great change and reinforced the role of governance models—a sort ofgolden age for systems based on Raymond’s description of bazaar versus cathedral and benevolent dictatorship versus meritocracy79 —the thirdchange in the history of such tools, which I will now introduce, is without question the one that will exacerbate the tension between the two
approaches to software freedom that I have introduced in this section,
and as a consequence the tipping point that will change the way forking
was perceived thus far.
This third alteration is the replacement of client-server architecturewith that of distributed version control system (DVCS). With DVCS, there
is no more central repository, and no more fixed topology for the networked organisation of software production. Because each DVCS is bothclient and server, every copy of the project is a fork and the programmer
works first on their local copy before deciding to push which part of their78

Gabriella Coleman, “High-Tech Guilds in the Era of Global Capital,” Anthropology ofWork Review 22, no. 1 (2001): 28–32.
79
Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

347

changes and to which other repository. At first this model seems to suggest a less rigid relation between the embedding of moral and social aspects of work in technology, because indeed in the case of DVCS it is up tosocial conventions to shape the network topology of software production,and this with extremely great flexibility, with the possibility of breaking
free from the more traditional models of governance. However whenseveral DVCS implementations—such as arch, bazaar, codeville, darcs, git,
mercurial—started to gain popularity in the mid-noughties they were notperceived positively,80 precisely because “the very conveniences [DVCS]
provides also promote fragmentary social behaviours that aren’t healthy
for [free and] open source communities.”81 It is a threat because the historical situation becomes suddenly inverted: forking takes less work andeffort than interacting with an existing community. Sending changes
back to other code repositories becomes optional, and depends on thewillingness to interact with other developers, and of course the willingness of these to accept changes. Above all, DVCS shows that the old
assumption where “it will almost always be more economical for a potential forker to try to get the technical changes he wants incorporated
into the existing code base […], rather than to split off and try to create
a new community,”82 might have been wishful thinking, or at least needs
serious revision.
However, in the same way the success story of the Linux kernel project80

Ben Collins-Sussman, “The Risks of Distributed Version Control,” 2005, http://blog.
red-bean.com/sussman/?p=20.
81
Ibid.
82
Weber, The Success of Open Source, 160.

348

helped construct the nineties free and open source software narrative ofmany programmers collaborating and working together, and became aposter child for the bazaar and benevolent dictator model of free software governance, the same project is at the centre of a shift in mentality
regarding forking. As mentioned in the previous part of this thesis, Android, Google’s mobile operating system, relies on the Linux kernel, but
due to several issues that are not so relevant here,83 Google’s work on the
kernel was essentially done on a branch which grows further away fromits original source, with little to no possibility of merging back changes
and additions. In turn, the initial contributions, then abandoned, from
Google to the mainline source code repository were removed. The conflict was initially framed as a stereotypical situation were communication
is difficult but forking is easier, but what was new here, is that next to theusual knee-jerk response of forking as a threat to communities and the reciprocal blaming for which party was at the source of the situation, there
was a subtle shift in the perception of forking. Chris DiBona, American
software engineer and director of Open Source and Science Outreach at
Google, posted during the tense exchanges of 2010:[…] this whole thing stinks of people not liking Forking. Forking isimportant and not a bad thing at all. From my perspective, forking
is why the Linux kernel is as good as it is.84

The rise of DVCS put in motion a process in which forking transformed

83

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, “Linus Torvalds on Android, the Linux Fork,” 2011, http://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-on-android-the-linux-fork/.
84
Chris DiBona, “Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux Kernel Community(Comment),” 2010, https://lwn.net/Articles/372419/.

349

from vice to virtue. because in effect it offered a way for sandboxed communities to go forth and multiply by following this radical materialisation of deregulated software freedom, and expanding the development of
the metacommunities, “sparsely or thickly connected populations of objects, users, producers”85 , that surround code repositories. But this new
approach also launched into fame a web platform such as GitHub, in leading the self-coined trend of social coding, that sits at the cross-roads ofsocial networks, project managements tools, and revision control.86 On
GitHub, anyone is able to have several public git repositories, a popular
revision control system, and is given the ability to fork any other repository by clicking on a button, simply called Fork. The button is enhancedwith a counter that reveals how many forks have been made of the given
repository, making explicit, within this platform, how forking ends up
as a popularity contest. Users of the platform are also able to contributeback changes they make to their fork, to the parent repository, and employ a specific property of git, which allows them to cherry-pick changes
made in other forks. These basic operations represent the so-called “social life” of code sharing on GitHub.87 They can also simply ignore theparent repository and give a new context to their fork. In fact other features offered by both the git software and GitHub itself, and the ability

85

Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Adrian Mackenzie, Richard Mills and Stuart
Sharples, “Big Diff, Granularity, Incoherence, and Production in the Github Software Repository,” in Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology, and the Social, ed.
Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo, and Eivind Røssaak (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2017), 89.
86
Ibid.
87
See Adrian Mackenzie, “What Is an Important Event? 175 Million Events and Counting. Notes for Public Lecture at It University of Copenhagen” (https://github.com/
metacommunities/metacommunities.git, March 5, 2014).

350

to track all these, could have the potential to provide a rich “account of
how people move through code,”88 and generally speaking the reason that
leads scholar Adrian Mackenzie to argue that “software today is less likea machine, a system or even an assemblage, and more like a crowd.”89 But
given everything discussed so far in this thesis—from the proto free andopen source era of computational culture, its strange modes of organisation and the UNIX fellowship, and of course the Cambrian explosion offree and open things triggered by free culture—this analogy to the crowd
could easily apply since the early days of code sharing. In fact, private
forks and exotic code-hosting platforms are nothing new, but GitHub
contributes an authoritative centralisation and forced visibility of suchpractices. The shift is not so much from machine to crowd, but—and expanding on Mackenzie’s urban metaphors—it is the transition from rural
coding communities to the coding city crowd, through the means of theGemeinschaft emulation originally triggered by the use of free and open
source techno-legal templates. But more importantly here, this crowd
is in fact trapped. While GitHub provides very effective, and easy touse, tools to facilitate the self-organisation of communities around one
single repository, there is a catch. To permit the construction of extra
systems on top of the git DVCS the repositories are forked within the
GitHub platform, thus revealing the irony of centralising a completely
distributed system into one giant… sandbox, where almost one half of88

Adrian Mackenzie, “Code-Traffic : Code Repositories, Crowds and Urban Life,” in
Code and the City, ed. Rob Kitchin and Sung-Yueh Perng (London: Routledge, 2016),
86.
89
Ibid., 87.

351

the repositories are forks from other repositories.90
While networked decentralisation has been perceived as an empowering instrument, as best exemplified with Dmytri Kleiner’s Peer-to-Peer
Communism vs Client-Server Capitalist State,91 the techno-legal mechanisms that permit such decentralisation have been greatly overlooked. In
retrospect, it is clear that when P2P rose to popularity, it first appeared toprovide a lightweight, democratic, and nomadic alternative to the clientserver models of transactions and capitalisation, but that was however
not counting without how this new model could also be embedded into
other systems of different nature. This is once again very well illustrated
with GitHub and shows that no matter what is the topology of network
labour, there will always be opportunities to create overlapping structures to control and capitalise it. In the case of GitHub, this capitalisation is moved to another level. What has escaped from the controlof macro-liberal/micro-communal groups is now collected by this platform, a new form of browser-assisted massive local file system source
control à la CLEAR-CASTER, a shared and collaborative file-sharing app
for programmers in the age of Internet turned into an Operating System,92 worse, a download site.93 Similarly, it is possible to witness how
the yielding effect suggested by Raymond, can be captured by a platform

90

Adrian Mackenzie, “Large Numbers:
Imitative Fluxes in the DataMaterial Imaginary.
Notes for Material, Visual and Digital Culture
Research
Seminars
2015-16,
University
CollegeLondon”(https://github.com/metacommunities/metacommunities.git, February 1, 2014).
91
Kleiner, The Telekommunist Manifesto.
92
In reference to Tim O’Reilly, “The State of the Internet Operating System,” 2010,
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/state-of-internet-operating-system.html.
93
Mackenzie, “What Is an Important Event? 175 Million Events and Counting.”352

like GitHub. It does not matter what the yield is and it certainly is a variable element, but while the use of software can escape GitHub as easily aswith a clone command, its context cannot be extracted from the different
additional social and technological features that GitHub has built aroundthe popular DVCS. In the process the licenses are replaced with Termsof Services,94 and the employees and founders of the platform, whose
core components are strategically closed source,95 are the ones to decide
what projects and behaviours are acceptable. They establish a nearly feudal meta-model of governance on top of the communities and groups
they host, occasionally taking advantage of their overarching landlord
position, thanks to the newly-acquired virtuous property of forking, todirectly tap for their own benefit into the gigantic pool of disposable code
they host, regardless of the damage this creates to independent programmers turned sharecroppers.96

94

A recent study in 2013, even if it was essentially simple data scraping, showed thatout of nearly 1.7 million code repositories on GitHub, less than 15% had a license.
See Neil McAllister, “Study: Most Projects on Github Not Open Source Licensed,” The
Register, 2013, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/18/github_licensing_study/.
95
Tom Preston-Werner, “Open Source (Almost) Everything,” 2011, http://tom.
preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html.
96
For an example of such abuse see Aymeric Mansoux, “Fork Workers,” in Are You Being
Served?, ed. Anne Laforet, Marloes de Valk, Madeleine Aktypi, An Mertens, Femke
Snelting, Michaela Lakova, and Reni Höffmuller (Brussels: Constant, 2014).

353

8.3

On Forking Homes, Sandboxes andSoftware Exile

The idea of a sandbox culture is not to be understood solely metaphorically. The way cultural processes and transformations take place in freeculture are always contained within strict boundaries, whether it is fromthe software structures that support human communication, the policies
that shape them, the source code and other digital cultural expressions
produced, and finally the licenses and other legal and pseudo-legal mechanisms that regulate cooperation. At each level the effect of sandboxing
can be perceived, yet these sandboxes not only do not necessarily alignin terms of ideologies, they also exist as multiple concurrent systems ofbelief, for social groups that are thus not federated around a belief, butaround techno-legal systems that work as a mediation between style andbeliefs, thereby preventing direct confrontation and providing an illusionof common and shared intent.
This creates a situation where the more context is given to analyse
what happens in a techno-legal sandbox, the more difficult it is to rationalise it, always switching from one state to another. In Evil Media,
British critical theorists Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey proposes a
way to avoid such deadlock, and explore instead the colourful corpuscles
that constitute greyness.

[I]n a period in which it is difficult to trace patterns of conflict andthe emergence of antagonism back to a single binary opposition
with any degree of plausibility, the gray zones of gray media callfor new forms of investigation and a nuanced approach to the kinds354

of tensions and patterns of interference that arise.97

The approach of technology as either black and white boxes does notwork any better than its underlying dichotomous narrative. We are all
working in white or black boxes nested inside black or white boxes, themselves components of many other black or white boxes, like a KafkaesqueMatryoshka doll. In this situation, if there is control and exploitation
over work, they are increasingly exercised at a different level, which is
not perceived by participants who are still able to develop a local culture,
cooperative models, and experiment with all sorts of techno-legal frameworks, therefore allowing opposing values, ethics, and politics to co-exist
and grow stronger. Rather, the greyness of the systemic ambiguity foundin free culture so far is always encoded as discreet binaries, and it is thedithering between these that give the illusion of different shades of grey,
because the ambiguity raised by the dithering of black and white binaries is in reality razor sharp, well defined, and coherent within in its own
local logic. There is indeed little fuzziness left when the rules in place
are interpreted strictly with the matching apparatus: source code is compiled successfully or not, licenses are compatible or not, definitions help
filter licenses into precise groups, access is granted or revoked based onpolicies, and so forth.
If greyness there is, it is a cultural illusion, or more precisely the byproduct of a constant motion from one sandbox to another. These sandboxes, whether they manifest themselves as a license, a software commu-

97

Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, Evil Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 31.

355

nity, a tool, or even a file system, are not perfect. There is always a moment of tension, conflict, a form of ugliness in their idealistic interfaces.
It is during these moments of conflict that some of its inhabitants are
given a small window of opportunity, out of which they see through theflawlessness of its rules, and might understand why some had described
the perfection of these simple systems as illusions.98 These are simple
because, to borrow from Mouffe’s critique of rationalist and individualist
forms of liberalism,99 such sandboxes are archetypical of a form of liberalism that is unable to hold the pluralistic nature of the social world, inwhich conflict cannot be solved rationally and there cannot be a fully inclusive rational consensus; such conflicts are thus ignored and pluralism
within sandboxes must be presented as harmonious and non-conflictual
assemblages of different perspectives and values.
Simple yes, but not merely illusions. To be sure, these sandboxes createa cybernetic illusion in which society can be described in terms of simple
operations, but the framework in place, the infrastructural implementations of such illusion, is not illusive and provides a very tangible meansof production and social organisation. But when the wall of a sandbox
cracks, its participants are projected right into a classical Heideggeriansituation, namely that even though these sandboxes are very much handy
and at our disposal, zuhandenheit 100 —like a tool required to achieve a par-98

Scott Timberg, “Jaron Lanier: The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class,” Salon,
2013, https://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_lanier_the_internet_destroyed_the_middle_class/.
99
Mouffe, On the Political, 10–11.
100
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927; repr., Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2010).

356

ticular action—when conflicts emerge from what appeared to be a trivial
trigger—such as in the examples cited earlier, or with a failed software installation, or the commercial appropriation of commercially prohibited
licensed material—then these sandboxes suddenly become visible, objectively present, vorhandenheit,101 leaving the demystified sandbox participants confronted with their diversity of illusions. It is a painful wake up
call, a democratic failure that shows the limit of consensus, and the priceto pay for a free culture that has ignored the proliferation of its language
games, instead benefiting, regardless ot its intention, from miscommunication and misunderstandings in an attempt to control and normalise
these practices, wrongly equating differences under common terms anddefinitions. As it turns out, without means and channels for pluralism
and cultural diversity to take place within free culture, the attempt to
get rid of the proto-free-culture agonistic situation does not manage toeradicate conflicts, instead it pressure-cooks them.
At this point, something interesting happens which deviates slightly
from the usual process of revelation. Any new knowledge acquired by
the conflict will unlikely result in a revolution, even a mere evolutionof the sandbox dogma that was just dispelled. When the fog lifts or thestorm passes, for many the only way out will be denial, in fact a way
in, further down the sandbox. There is simply too much at stake, toomuch has been invested in and built around these things already for the
one-dimensional sandbox inhabitant.102 But in the sandbox, denial and

101
102

Ibid.
In reference to Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964; repr., Hoboken: Taylor; Francis, 2013).

357

commitment are not necessarily proof of an uncritical dogmatism,103 orcomplete subjugation: it is a survival mechanism to overcome and ignore
the unhandiness of these sandboxes, in order to sustain the rational-legal
authority of the techno-legal structure that provides a sense of belonging
within the sandbox.
I would also add that this sense of belonging creates a sentiment, a master position within one’s own belief, which is demoted to a slave ressentiment once the formal abstraction of the sandbox appears,104 and that can
only be suppressed indeed with denial in the hope to recreate the illusion of the open ended, boundary-less progressive development of suchplatforms, and comfort the sentiment of mastery. Of course that does
not apply to everyone. Seeing the ugliness leaking from the cracks inthe sandbox walls, an opportunity is given for some of its inhabitants
to migrate to other territories, gather strength and seize that momentto live through their own techno-legal assisted Aufklärung 105 by claiming their own sandbox, as a mark of self-management, maturation, andmaybe progress. It is also more than a static schism or rupture, but aswith the lift of the forking taboo,106 it amplifies the constant gradual andexploratory becoming of those that escape a sandbox, making sandbox
culture representative of a modernist ontology of ourselves.107 There is103

Here I am referring to Jaron Lanier’s criticism of open source. See Jaron Lanier, You
Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2011), 126.
104
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, “Good and Evil”, “Good and Bad” (1887).
105
Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: ’What Is Enlightenment?’ (London: Penguin Books, 2013).
106
Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Adrian Mackenzie, Richard Mills and Stuart
Sharples, “Big Diff, Granularity, Incoherence, and Production in the Github Software
Repository.”
107
Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?” Magazine Littéraire 207 (1984): 35–358

however a counterpart to this process, in the way that it is a spectacle,108
and may also exist as a radical and global alternative in itself.109110 Thereis therefore a possibility for those who are able to escape their sandbox
to turn into the new rulers, gurus, benevolent dictators, facilitators of a
new sandbox, that will in turn be populated by those spectators who followed such new leaders down the rabbit hole. The slave can therefore
also accept their past condition, and move to other sandboxes in which
they regain their status of master, either through construction, in thecase of building a new sandbox for others, or delusion, in which casethey migrate from one demystified system of belief to a new one. In all
situations, the collapse of free cultural belief does not lead to its destruction, but to a new generative force. So in a way, if openness facilitates
the creation of iron cages,111 it also gives the democratic possibility forvirtually anyone to create their own, creating new social imaginaries aspart of an agenda, an exit strategy, or simply to relieve a personal itch. Inthat sense the notion of a sandbox culture is strongly linked to the ideathat liberalism can accommodate a diversity of different models of socialorganisation and modes of production. To be sure, the system I describe
does not offer true pluralism but a post-democratic emulation of it. Whatis more, it shows that the existence of such systems are symptomatic of
the current political struggle that moves to the moral register—it’s not

39.
Ibid.
109
Michel Foucault, “What Is Enligthenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow(London: Penguin Books, 1984).
110
Please note that the last two references are in fact two different texts from Foucault.
111
In reference to Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
108

359

“right vs left” but “right vs wrong”112 —hard coded into conflict defusing
licenses that determine and dictate what is acceptable or not beyond any
form of debate or evaluation.
The sandbox model gives a privileged position to techno-legal infrastructure, their software and legal code, as constituent element and sourceof power. This was necessary for me to articulate it in such a way in order to explain two things: First, that the mechanism of discursivity in freeculture, that has always been analysed from the perspective of the movements that may animate it—like the opposition between free software andopen source software113 —happens at a much lower level, which is that of
the individuals and communities gathered around the production of freecultural objects; but secondly, sandboxes are in effect non-human normalising and subjugating surrogates, or proxies, for those who control
or initiate them. The consequence of these two points is that the existence of such sandboxes challenges the idea that systems of domination
are only terminal forms of power.114 The sandbox provides an opposite
model precisely because it demonstrates that it is possible to limit themultiplicity of force relations and their confrontation.115 However, thisdoes not mean that the emergence of reverse discourses116 —the reclaiming of free culture-related terms for other motives117 —is impossible, it is,112

Mouffe, On the Political.
Berry, Copy, Rip, Burn, Chapter 5 The Contestation of Code.
114
In reference to Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction(1976; repr., New York: Random House, 1978), 92.
115
See ibid., Chapter 2 Method.
116
Ibid., 101.
117
Here I must explain that the reference to reappropriation is not a stretch. Of course,
reverse discourse was articulated by Foucault in the context of homosexuality, however the free cultural model, in which the control of terms such as freedom and open-

113

360

but the manifestation of reverse discourses happens at a higher level, because inside the sandbox, conflict does not translate into the opportunity
to reprogram the social organisation of the system, but triggers instead
the necessity to exile towards other sandboxes or create new ones, fromscratch or by forking.
In a sense, if making visible the decontextualised formal abstraction of
the sandbox highlights its neglect for its inner discourse, it also provides amechanism to defuse its dominance. The dominated and manipulated relations within the sandbox that cannot be changed from within can therefore be reconsidered from the outside, creating a sort of meta-discourse,
and thus providing the development process needed for the existence ofa discursive free culture. What is more, its techno-legal code based immaterial territoriality permits a limitless creation of new nations for everycrisis. If seen through the lens of the freedom theory proposed by twentieth German psychologist Erich Fromm118 —in which are discussed therelationship between emancipation and submission—the creation of new
sandboxes serve as a parable where participants free themselves fromtheir current working condition, and end up in a new position where they
are free to pursue an emancipating process in a new environment. In thiscase the transition is nearly seamless as the replacement offered has been
partly experienced already. However, and still following Fromm’s con-ness, follows the same patterns of incessant recontextualisation between dominantgroups and minority groups. This is not limited to free culture jargon, offensive
words are also reclaimed, such as the Internet slang freetard, originally coined tomock both free-as-in-gratis and free-as-in-free-speech free culture supporters, andthat would end being used nonetheless by the latter in some Internet forums andboards to reinforce their identity.
118
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Owl Book, 1994).

361

cept, it remains to be seen if this is a change for the better, and also if thisindividual experience is unique, or instead something that can be replicated for all the members of the virtual community. Indeed, the newly
gained freedom of the participants, can also be a factor revealing thatwhat others had thought about their participation as an act of positive
freedom, was in fact a masquerade now that they are confronted with thepositive freedom of others, a freedom that is universally defined but singularly interpreted. In the end, all of Marcuse’s one-dimensional men areable, in a strange way, to form a nonetheless strange and ever-changing
multi-dimensional society, and avoid, again in a very indirect way, anyhegemonic dominance of its discourse. And yet it is more than just a
type of classic liberalism that is described here because this model, by
the means of the techno-legal template, is able to provide the structuralchannels for pluralism to exist.
That said, this pluralism is threatened whenever such practices havebeen filtered or rationalised with umbrella definitions for free culture, oropen content or knowledge, which greatly limits the discursive scope ofthese sandboxes. In fact the free cultural process becomes much moreinteresting in terms of cultural diversity when it is undefined and tries
to attack the immutable foundations of these sandboxes, by creating incompatible situations, as I have suggested earlier with, for example, nonmilitary statements. For instance, the way license forking operates isindeed both effective and simple: isolate an issue that is not compatible with a mode of production, a creative process, a belief, or an ethicalcode, and then manipulate the terms of the permission in a way that will
make this issue visible through the way the work is being shared and pub362

lished. The goal is to be explicit about a point of conflict by encoding thedivergence in the legal apparatus of these new sandboxes. For instance
the GPL is mutating into the eGPL, the Exception GPL, which allows the
exclusion of certain groups or organisations from using the licensed material.119 Another mutant is John Magyar and Dmytri Kleiner’s PPL, thePeer Production License, forked from the Creative Commons’ BY-NCSA license and that privileges work-owned businesses and collectives inwhich the different financial gains are distributed among work-owners.120
The life expectancy of such licenses is always difficult to predict, but their
existence proves the possibility of taming the free cultural normalisation
and rationalisation, and the possibility to revert to the healthier and morediverse agonistic pluralism of the proto-free culture era.
Ultimately, the whole mechanism of forking sandboxes reveal thetrue greyness of a defined culture freedom, in migratory movementsthat keeps it alive. It all boils down to realising that these sandboxes
have became a home-sweet-home for many, and the denial of the issues
attached to them is not lack of compassion or empathy, but simply, as
I discussed earlier, a matter of survival. However, every now and thenexile is the only way out. Exile was actually the most fundamental
argument for the first public justification of free software. As discussed
in Chapter 1, this justification was very much linked to the need of
departing from an original home spoiled by the computer industry, and

119“EXCEPTION GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE - Version 2, January 2009 - DRAFT
7,” 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20090517011228/http://www.egpl.info/egpl-2.
0.txt.
120
Kleiner, The Telekommunist Manifesto, 5.

363

set into motion a partly voluntary, partly imposed, journey towards
new operating systems to populate. If understanding the legal aspect offree software is a useful method for extrapolating its influence on digital
culture, it should always be examined in relation to the conditions ofdeparture of those who participate in these practices. Within the realmof software, software migration is often depicted as a wilfull process inwhich one is moved from one technological environment to, hopefully,
a better one. While the software and hardware upgrade cycles havebecome a well accepted mass consumer phenomena, the root of free
software is, on the contrary, based on the refusal to take for granted
that such improvements and migration is invariably positive. In thatsense free software is the strongest example of software exile. Similarly,
artists, designers, musicians and writers that are interested in freeculture licenses, are responding in the form of a broader cultural exile,and because of the techno-legal template of free software, such cultural
exile can be repeated endlessly.
It is also striking that this cultural exile, from one sandbox to another,
exhibits similar characteristics to physical exile. Exile, regardless of thetangibility of its context, always comes at a price of solitude and loss. Because the latter must be compensated, the exile often reinforces a sharper,
stronger, black and white vision of the world with an “exaggerated senseof group solidarity, and a passionate hostility to outsiders, even those
who may in fact be in the same predicament as you.”121 Therefore it is121

Edward W. Saïd, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), Reflections on Exile, p. 141.

364

no surprise to witness anger, paranoia, aggressiveness, manias and overall quite emotional responses in the way members of these communities
interact with each other and their sandboxed home. In fact, it does notmatter what the object of tension is: a license, a program, a piece of hardware, an operating system, a metaphor, or even a compiler flag. Anythinggoes. At the same time, this tension is a very powerful creative energy,
which is why it must be sustained at any cost.
Palestinian American literary theorist and critic Edward Saïd quotes
Richard Ellmann to illustrate this point. He explains how James Joyce
maintained by all means his quarrel with Ireland, in order to feed a stateof creative loneliness in exile. An exile that he specifically chose “to give
force to his artistic vocation.”122 It does not take much effort to see a similar pattern, in the way some artists and designers sustain a certain negative emotion towards the proprietary tools they used to work with, andtransform this energy in the development of a tailored technical craft,through which their individuation is realised.123 So like exile, software
exile is indeed not an event in time, it is a time on its own, yet that issynced with the computer clock of the homeland. Alternatives proposedby proto-free and free cultural systems can quickly become places of dogmatic behaviour that is nurtured and nursed in this new home. The latterbecomes a substrate for the creation of a liberated set of tools, licenses

122
123

Ibid., Reflections on Exile, p. 145.
A similar point is made by Mouffe in her effort to develop the friend-enemy modelfrom German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt. She refers in particular tothe constitutive outside, a term coined by Henry Staten, and itself based on several
ideas from Derrida. Mouffe uses this concept so as to develop a relational modelof difference between identities and, unlike Schmitt’s model, one that is compatible
with democratic pluralism. See Mouffe, On the Political, 14–15, p. 19.

365and practices. To paraphrase Saïd, and once again transpose his reflections on exile to reflections on software exile, such behaviour finds its
root in a discontinuous state of being that leads exiles to see themselves
as belonging to a triumphant ideology, in order to reconstitute their broken lives, and of course the broken home directories of their operating
system.
But most importantly, there is another facet to software exile, a morepositive one, which is the detachment it can create in relation not just to
one sandbox, but to every sandbox. Saïd, again, quotes Theodor Adorno:“it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” Here I am
tempted to substitute the word home with the system variables that represent home directories in all the popular multi-user operating systems,%UserProfile%, $HOME, and ˜, precisely to highlight the need of detach-ment from one’s tools, a detachment that can be quickly forgotten in therush and excitement of conquering the sandbox blank files and canvases.
Thus, possibly the biggest force of free software, and by extension freeculture, does not lie in moving to a better home directory, or to embracea digital and globalist cosmopolitan city crowd, but rather to reveal theecosystem of these many sandboxes and their subculture, to understand,through detachment and distance, the context from which they emerged
and how they can create different modes of inquiry. It is about actively
observing patterns and not just passively generate them like a flip-flopstuck in an electronic sandbox. Ultimately it is about gaining awarenessthat this plurality and proliferation is not a fault but, again going back to
the notion of agonistic pluralism, it is a democratic foundation to makesure these sandboxes can sustain conflictual positions and oppose their366different hegemonic vision. Finally, even though nomadic and purposeful migratory networks can bridge these different sandboxes, their existence is nothing other than a higher level form of sandboxing, itself
driven by, and a manifestation of other ideological pursuits. There is no
escape, and it’s fine like that.

367

Conclusion

368

Summary of the Argument
In this thesis, I have explored what impact free and open source software
principles and practices has on the making of art, and cultural production in general. My main research question was: in which practical andtheoretical ways has free and open source software licensing provided amodel of transformation for art and cultural production?
Such a question is timely and important for several reasons. First, as Ishow in the dissertation, there has been almost two decades of writing,experiments, and various attempts to adapt free and open source principles and practices beyond the realm of software engineering. Concretely,
it means that there is now enough material, efforts and works to start
discussing them and, to assess, for the first time, the viability of making
non-software works and cultural expressions, using techno-legal systems
similar to those found in free and open source software production. Second, today only a very few pseudo-free and free cultural licenses, likethose from Creative Commons, are being used as alternatives to standard
copyright protection. Do they represent all the possible alternatives for
cultural freedom or only a very tiny sample? Of course, I explain whysome of these legal documents became dominant, but I also discuss theplethora of other licenses available, and that cultural producers are also
free to come up with their own terms, which is a crucial strategy for the
license to effectively work as a paratextual artist’s statement, but also an
economic strategy, or the manifestation of a counter-hegemonic effort bycultural minorities. There is therefore a need to question the dominanceof a few licenses that have became omnipresent and found their way, very369

often unquestioned, into all sorts of places from clauses in cultural institution contracts that artists must sign for a commission, to open accessacademic journals, as well as web platforms legal framework for users tocontribute or share content, but also as methods taught in academies anduniversities. In this situation, culture producers are not encouraged to articulate their work by the means of designing their own techno-legal media, but are instead asked to choose amongst limited and pre-fabricatedoptions. As a result, these documents, which are inscribed in a discourseof transparency and openness, can also become smoke screens, whichmeans it is not always clear who benefits from this free circulation of
information. Third, the techno-legal models of social organisation introduced by free and open source principles and practices have been an
overlooked annunciator of issues found today in so-called algorithmic
societies and other environments where “code is law,”1 a motto that wasfor instance recently revived with the rise of cryptocurrencies. In particular the shortcomings of such codification could already be perceived infree and open source communities where the political was either denied,or ignored, in favour of techno-legal assisted systems that claimed to replace human mediation in order to solve issues of power and control, atrend that has been more broadly generalised recently as technology solutionism.2 As I have illustrated in the first part of this thesis, if on the
one hand free software had enabled the empowering constitution and or-1
2

In reference to Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace : Version 2.0(New York: Basic books, 2006).
Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here : Technology, Solutionism, and theUrge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist (London: Penguin Books, 2014).

370

ganisation of code-centric—software and legal code—communities, it isalso to this date the biggest self-applied experiment in cybernetics, given
the important role given to technology and regulatory processes to treat
culture as a system that can be fully controlled. This came with several
strings attached, as was discussed throughout the thesis, but notably in
Chapter 6, the problem of reducing and simplifying culture to only a few
specific processes and products.
To answer my main research question, I divided the thesis into threeparts, named after Stallman’s famous attempt to contextualise software
freedom in his own terms: free as in speech.3 In the first part Free as
in… Culture, I discuss what makes free and open source software principles and practices relevant to cultural production. This is articulated overtwo chapters. I argue in Chapter 1 that free software was not so much aparadigm shift in terms of software production, but what was exceptional
about it was the techno-legal template it provided to help constitute andregiment communities. In Chapter 2, I show that such a template wasable to provide an abstraction of the subcultural hero rhetoric, one reason why it was appropriated so widely by groups and individual outsideof the original context of free and open source software culture. However, using the concept of agonistic pluralism from Mouffe, I argue thatthese appropriations eventually became subject to the aggregative anddeliberative normalisation process from Creative Commons and Freedom
Defined projects respectively, in which the desire to develop a consensual
approach to cultural freedom, came at the price of excluding other princi-

3

Stallman, “What Is Free Software?” 2001.

371

ples and practices of cultural freedom that conflicted with these dominant
projects.
In the second part, Free as in… Art, I look into the overlaps and difference between the discourse from free and open source software, its
artistic adaption known as free art, and the free culture generalisation.
This discussion is carried over three chapters. In Chapter 3, I use freeart as an example of the appropriation of the free software techno-legal
template in art, and I explain that despite the free culture umbrella, there
exists irreconcilable differences between the different communities thatare presented as the same movement. In Chapter 4, I argue that next
to these discrepancies there was also a second stage cultural appropriation happening when other artists and practitioners started to use freecultural techno-legal systems in their work yet without engaging with
the individuals or groups from which such systems originated. I thenconclude the second part with Chapter 5, explaining how these different levels of cultural diffusion have resulted to misunderstandings andfaulty generalisation, both by practitioners but also in their theoreticalanalyses. However, taking copyleft as an example, I have also shownthat misunderstanding can also happen at another level, that is to say
in the lack of recognition of how free culture exists at the cross-roads ofdifferent fields and historical contexts, making it difficult to provide anabsolute reasoning of why artists engage in free cultural practices.
Finally, in the third and last part of the thesis, Free as in… Trapped, I
discuss what kind of techno-legal and social systems are created by free
and open source practices. In Chapter 6, I argue that so far the approach372

consisting of strictly defining free culture, struggles to offer more than asystem in which culture is limited to the sharing of files over the Internet. With such an approach, I explain that potentiality and accessibility of
information—could I get these files now and what could I do with them—
became the dominant form of criteria to determine the value of a workor cultural expression. I also explain that the impossibility of precisely
defining free cultural sources prevented a complete transposition of free
software principles to free non-software works and cultural expressions.
In Chapter 7, I then explain that the free cultural discourse of potentiality
and accessibility distracts from discussing the systems in which free cultural information is used. To give a name to such systems, I suggest using
the metaphor of the sandbox to describe the techno-legal frameworks inwhich free and open source things are shared and produced, I also explain
how sandboxing was historically introduced in the mix between operating systems and social systems. To conclude, in Chapter 8, I explain
how the sandbox model could be used to understand the different mechanism of replication existing within free culture, notably taking softwareand license forking as an example. I also argue that this model explains
why free and open source communities give the impression of constantly
becoming, and that it also permits an indirect democratic process fromwhich new discourses and counter-hegemonic efforts can emerge, but at
the same time are threatened by free cultural normalisation which impoverishes their discursivity and tends to exclude practices rather thanallowing cultural diversity.

373

A Model for the Transformation of Art andCultural Production?
As noted in the introduction, the impact on cultural production of practices developed in relation to the ideas of free and open source software
has been both influential and broadly applied. However, what this research highlights is that a line must be drawn between what free culture
believes it is doing to culture, and what happens when practitioners actually engage with cultural freedom, that is to say, when they want toliberate their practice from so-called tools of the trade and establishedworkflows, or when they want to free their work from traditional meansof publishing, distribution, or appropriation. One is clear, orderly andrigid, while the other is messy, chaotic and adaptive. British scholar John
Clarke refers to bricolage, that is to say, the juxtaposition, re-ordering,
rearrangement of previously unconnected objects to produce new meanings, so as to illustrate the generative process of subcultural styles and cultural identities.4 What my research shows is that a situation of bricolage
is almost unavoidable once practitioners are engaged with free culture.
Regardless of whether this situation is accidental or conscious, it leads tothe creation of many new codes of meaning. If artists, designers, writers,
and musicians, who started to use and write free software as part of theirpractice have been in effect bricoleurs sharing a common starting point
using directly, or inspired by, the free software techno-legal template, I
argue these bricoleurs did not however necessarily share anything from4

John Clarke, “Style,” in Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War
Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (London: Hutchinson, 1986), 175–91.

374

a cultural or political point of view, and were likely to engage, right fromthe start, in incompatible or conflicting ideological pursuits. And this isvery fine.
This is where the line between the two kinds of free culture on which I
attempted to draw earlier becomes crucial. Free culture as a messy collection of hacked identities and bricolage should not be mixed up with freeculture as a universal model for cultural production. In the former there
are various levels of cultural appropriation happening: from anarchism,
rastafarianism, punk, hippysm, transhumanism, and more, as found in
the early free software and art field and today’s free-range free culture
practitioners. With their broken laptops, DIY software and unstable media art, together they form a rich supermarket of styles,5 in which participants collectively think about societal issues, and derive new utopias
from the original free society of Stallman. In this version of free culture,
cultural freedom is not an end, but a means. But, by contrast, in the defined and tamed free cultural model, there is nothing but the uniform andnormalised style of a creative industry working class, an efficient lifestylewith liberated software that just works, professional interfaces to a culture
where the political is denied, and the only thing that matters is a productive free circulation of information. In this free culture, acknowledging
the existence of diverging forces weakens the community or movement,
license fragmentation and incompatibility is a problem, and specialists
are the ones crafting techno-legal human readable tools for the masses to5

Ted Polhemus, “In the Supermarket of Style,” in The Clubcultures Reader: Readings inPopular Cultural Studies, ed. Steve Redhead (1997; repr., Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).

375

use. Here, cultural freedom becomes akin to a technocratic policy, where
we are advised to buy into the label free culture without ever questioning
what it means.
The strongest advantage of free culture is the opportunity it offers toclaim back territories of knowledge and think collectively, as small-scalereflective groups, and not as obedient cooperative hordes. So when it
becomes a universal ready-made solution and end in itself, free culture
offers nothing but a variation of the systems it is thought to be an alternative to. In that sense, the history of free and open source software
production and its several transformations should also work as a warning for practitioners willing to apply its universal productive apparatus
to culture without critical assessment.
With that said, the rise of artistic and cultural interest in free and open
source software principles and practices is everything but an anecdote.
It is the embodiment of several elements that have announced important changes in artistic and cultural production at the turn of the millennia, which are ultimately more crucial than the inflated generalisation of
openness and the use of digital commons in an artistic setting, impliedby the deliberative or aggregative umbrella of free culture and Creative
Commons licensing. Such elements are: the call to turn legal and technological rules into a novel system to make art; the reflection on the nature of alienation and authorship; the access and distribution of culture
outside of official institutions and channels; the democratic dimensionof art-making liberated from elites; the living archaeology of the creative
process by bringing traceability and transparency; and most importantly,

376

the mark of an age of intellectual property and bureaucratic exaltation,
which is pushing artists to develop their practice within the administrative structure of society, and further embed it in their creative process,even if, in a paradoxical manner, it is sometimes done to object to thisvery machinery.
There is so much confusion and misunderstanding about all these elements because they manifest and materialise differently at several levels,
via a process of rationalisation that leads to the fragmentation of cultural
freedom into new codes of meaning, the ideological and emotional natureof which can be contradictory to or incompatible with each other. As aconsequence, free culture ends up being simply many different things at
once:• A toolkit for artists to expand their practice and free themselvesfrom consumerist workflows;• A template for political statements against authorities of any kind;• A novel creative legal and technical framework to interface withand support existing copyright law practices;• A lifestyle, and sometimes fashionable statement to go along withthe marketing of all things free and open;• An economic model that tries to reconcile the legacy of radical antiproperty art practice with the reformist nature of social critique;• An aesthetic in the sense of an audiovisual language, like meme culture, but also a number of novelty appropriative frameworks ranging from semionauts to circulationism.
In practice it is possible for a practitioner, and their audience, to cherry377

pick or only see one of these properties, and either ignore or not be awareof the others, making cultural freedom a series of multidimensionally onedimensional ambiguous objects, open to different interpretations, justlike the codes they were drafted in.
And yet, with all their imperfections, these appropriations are very important because they force cultural production outside of the path set bymainstream culture and ideologies. They push practices both into a corner and into strange places, where practitioners are forced to challenge
the dominant handy productive apparatus of their field. For instanceby forcing an animator to question what animation is, to force a movie
maker to rethink what cinema is and the networked creation and distribution of moving images, to create a constraint in which the tools forgraphic design and audiovisual performance must be reinvented, to help
the writer reconnects with a forgotten legacy of self-publishing strategies, etc. In that sense the use of free and open source principles andpractices in the context of art and cultural production relates closely toavant-garde practices, where different aesthetics of resistance are articulated. What is more, the collaborative aspect of free software production,and the free cultural licensing approach to the publishing and distributionof works, resonates strongly with politically engaged practices in which
the communication of intentions and the need to rally together, becomesa call to collectively think about things, to take action and not passively
accept the formalisation of issues and their solutions by specialists andprofessionals. This is why the abstraction of the subcultural hero rhetoricfound in the free software techno-legal template, even if flawed, is an essential inspiration for empowerment and cultural diversity.
378

Remark on Sandbox Culture and Future Research
In this thesis I have introduced a discussion on sandboxing, and it would
be interesting to see how it could be articulated beyond the free and open
source context—something I have only slightly touched upon in Chapter
8—because it is a model that is very relevant to how social systems areconstructed within network cultures.
Sandbox culture is a term that is sometimes used in connection with
open-ended games or virtual world platforms, to describe the different
activities happening within these environments. However, as discussed
in this thesis, the idea of a sandbox culture can go far beyond the boundaries of software-rendered virtual realities. Or, to be more precise, thisvirtualisation can be articulated differently at every level of its different
layers. For instance it rarely occurs that relationships and transactions
within a sandbox can also be sandboxed at another level. Technology andits legal apparatus, by the means of manipulation or misunderstandings,
generates a new imaginary, a magical thinking that inspires novel formsof organisation and production, which in return calls for the creation of
more technology to support the newly bootstrapped culture. It is bothfascinating and worrying to see how this affects our relationship withothers and with said technology, and how the cohesive rules of a community inside a sandbox provide the anchoring needed to cope with anexistence otherwise uprooted in global social, cultural, economic, and political systems. On their own, all these sandboxes have the potential tobe perfect friction-less standalone universes, scaled down to a particularbelief or lifestyle. Being able to detect our sandboxing is far from being379

trivial. To be sure, a sandbox culture is not just another term to describe
filter bubbles,6 fields,7 or subculture,8 but the precise techno-legal governance that shapes our vision of the world, and that it is purposefully
designed by others or ourselves to do so. What is more, a sandbox is
not purely metaphorical because its existence can be tracked down to its
exact codification: software source code and code as enforced system ofrules.
Sandboxing becomes tangible through the tensions and conflicts thatarise from the inability to reconcile the messiness of human interactions
with the programmatic rationalism of the rules, the codes, that are inscribed as the governance model within the sandbox. Its extreme formof cybernetic thinking hides behind the utopia they claim to offer. In a society that is increasingly programmed and scripted for efficiency and productivity, the binary nature of the software apparatus gives less and lessroom for negotiation, hesitation and reflection, no room for trust to be explored and grow at a human pace once it is outsourced and mediated bytechno-legal infrastructures. Further research is needed to establish why
this issue of trust seems to never be directly addressed, why it is always
deflected with more sandboxing and more codification. Looking at the social component of proto-, past and current conflation between operating
systems and social systems, it is clear that in the process of building digital infrastructures to inhabit, fundamental social mechanisms have been

6
7
8

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (London: Penguin
Books, 2011).
Bourdieu and Wacquant, “La Logique Des Champs.”
Hebdige, Subculture.

380

moved into these architectures, to the point where they became indistinguishable. We should not be surprised if today we are at their mercy.

381

Appendix: Selection ofProto-Free Culture Licenses

382This selection is ordered by year, then alphabetically for each year, as
the exact date of publishing of these documents is not always provided.
It is purposefully limited to licenses that aim to expand the scope of free
software to other domains, and excludes licenses only concerned with
software publishing. The selection stops in 2002, year of the publishingof the first Creative Commons licenses, which marks the start of a new
era in the history of free culture licenses. This does not mean new protofree culture licenses were not created after the introduction of Creative
Commons licensing, but this happened less frequently.
This collection of licenses is by no means exhaustive, but should givean idea of the broad diversity of contexts and intentions present in the
proto-free culture era, as well as indicate how the texts respond to eachother, borrow and share terms, introduce changes in meaning, sometimes
with subtlety, sometimes less so.

383

OpenContent License (1998)
OpenContent License (OPL)
Version 1.0, July 14, 1998.
This document outlines the principles underlying the OpenContent (OC) movement andmay be redistributed provided it remains unaltered. For legal purposes, this document
is the license under which OpenContent is made available for use.
The original version of this document may be found at
http://www.opencontent.org/opl.shtml
LICENSE
Terms and Conditions for Copying, Distributing, and Modifying
Items other than copying, distributing, and modifying the Content with which thislicense was distributed (such as using, etc.) are outside the scope of this license.
1. You may copy and distribute exact replicas of the OpenContent (OC) as you receiveit, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on eachcopy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all thenotices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give anyother recipients of the OC a copy of this License along with the OC. You may at youroption charge a fee for the media and/or handling involved in creating a unique copyof the OC for use offline, you may at your option offer instructional support for
the OC in exchange for a fee, or you may at your option offer warranty in exchange
for a fee. You may not charge a fee for the OC itself. You may not charge a fee forthe sole service of providing access to and/or use of the OC via a network (e.g. theInternet), whether it be via the world wide web, FTP, or any other method.
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the OpenContent or any portion of it, thus
forming works based on the Content, and distribute such modifications or work under
the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:a) You must cause the modified content to carry prominent notices stating that you
changed it, the exact nature and content of the changes, and the date of any change.
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in partcontains or is derived from the OC or any part thereof, to be licensed as a wholeat no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License, unless otherwise
permitted under applicable Fair Use law.
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sectionsof that work are not derived from the OC, and can be reasonably considered
independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do
not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you
distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the OC, thedistribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions
for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part
regardless of who wrote it. Exceptions are made to this requirement to releasemodified works free of charge under this license only in compliance with Fair Use law
where applicable.
3. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it.
However, nothing else grants you permission to copy, distribute or modify
the OC. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License.
Therefore, by distributing or translating the OC, or by deriving works herefrom, you
indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions
for copying, distributing or translating the OC.
NO WARRANTY
4. BECAUSE THE OPENCONTENT (OC) IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR
THE OC, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN
WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE OC ”AS IS” WITHOUTWARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO,
THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE
ENTIRE RISK OF USE OF THE OC IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE OC PROVE FAULTY, INACCURATE,OR OTHERWISE UNACCEPTABLE YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
5. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANYCOPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MIRROR AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE OC
AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL,INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE
OC, EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCHDAMAGES.

384

License Publique Audiovisuelle (1998)
License Publique Audiovisuelle
Projet Version 0.2 du vendredi 27 novembre 1998
Introduction
Ce document décrit les droits de diffusion pour des programmes audiovisuels. Il est
inspiré de la General Public License de la Free Software Foundation applicable surles logiciels libres.
Copyright © Association Vidéon
BP 221 F-91133 Ris Orangis Cedex FRANCE
La copie et la distribution de copies exactes de ce document sont autorisées, mais
aucune modification n’est permise. Préambule
Les licences de droits de diffusion de la plupart des programmes audiovisuels
sont définies pour limiter ou supprimer toute liberté à l’utilisateur ou au
diffuseur. À l’inverse, la Licence Publique Audiovisuelle (Audiovisual Public
License) est destinée à vous garantir la liberté de partager et de diffuser
les programmes audiovisuels, et de s’assurer que ces programmes sont effectivement
accessibles à tout utilisateur.
Cette Licence Publique Audiovisuelle s’applique aux contenus de la Banque deProgrammes libres de droits en ligne mise en place par l’association Vidéon, commeà tout autre programme dont l’auteur l’aura décidé. Vous pouvez aussi appliquer
les termes de cette Licence à vos propres programmes, si vous le désirez.
Liberté des programmes audiovisuels ne signifie pas que vous pouvez faire ce quevous voulez des programmes. Notre Licence est conçue pour vous assurer la libertéde diffuser des copies des programmes dans leur intégralité sans nécessiter depasser un accord préalable supplémentaire avec le propriétaire des droits.
Afin de garantir ces droits, nous avons dû introduire des restrictions interdisantà quiconque de vous les refuser ou de vous demander d’y renoncer. Ces restrictions
vous imposent en retour certaines obligations si vous distribuez ou diffusez descopies de programmes protégés par la Licence. En d’autre termes, il vous incombera
en ce cas de :transmettre aux destinataires tous les droits que vous possédez, leur remettrecette Licence afin qu’ils prennent connaissance de leurs droits.
Nous protégeons vos droits de deux façons : d’abord par le copyright du Programme
audiovisuel, ensuite par la remise de cette Licence qui vous autorise légalement à
copier, distribuer, diffuser et/ou traduire le programme audiovisuel.
En outre, pour protéger chaque auteur ainsi que Vidéon, nous affirmons
solennellement que le programme concerné ne fait l’objet d’aucune garantie. Si untiers l’inclus dans un autre programme (par exemple une émission) et/ou le traduit
puis le redistribue ou le rediffuse, tous ceux qui le recevront doivent savoir qu’ils’agit d’un programme inclus et/ou traduit afin que sa distribution ou sa diffusionn’entache pas la réputation de l’auteur du programme.
Enfin, tout programme libre est sans cesse menacé par la protection des droits
de reproduction et de diffusion. Nous souhaitons à tout prix éviter que desdistributeurs ou diffuseurs puissent protéger les droits de diffusion sur desprogrammes libres pour leur propre compte. Pour éviter cela, nous stipulons bien que
toute protection éventuelle d’un programme doit accorder expressément à tout unchacun le libre usage du produit.
Les dispositions précises et les conditions de copie, de distribution, de diffusion
et de traduction de nos programmes sont les suivantes :Stipulations et conditions relatives à la copie, la distribution, la diffusion etla traduction
Article 0.
La présente Licence s’applique à tout Programme Audiovisuel (incluant en
particulier les films, musiques, etc.) où figure une note, placée par le détenteur
des droits, stipulant que le dit Programme peut être distribué ou diffusé
selon les termes de la présente Licence. Le terme Programme désigne aussi bien leProgramme lui-même que tout travail qui en est dérivé selon la loi, c’est-à-diretout Programme ou une partie de celui-ci, à l’identique ou bien modifié, et/ou
traduit dans une autre langue. Chaque personne concernée par la Licence Publique385

Audiovisuelle sera désignée par le terme Vous.
Les activités autres que copie, distribution, diffusion ou traduction ne sont pas
couvertes par la présente Licence et sortent de son cadre. En particulier, lesdroits moraux sont régis par les législations nationales.
Article 1.
Vous pouvez copier, distribuer ou diffuser des copies conformes ou traduites dansleur intégralité du Programme Audiovisuel, tel que Vous l’avez reçu, sur n’importequel support, à condition de placer sur chaque copie ou d’indiquer à la diffusion
un copyright approprié et une restriction de garantie, de ne pas modifier ou omettre
toutes les stipulations se référant à la présente Licence et à la limitation degarantie, de fournir avec toute copie du Programme un exemplaire de la Licence ou defaire référence lors d’une diffusion à l’endroit où l’auditeur ou le spectateur
peut en trouver une copie.
Vous ne pouvez demander une éventuelle rétribution financière que pour laréalisation de la copie ou de la diffusion.
Article 2.
Vous pouvez inclure votre copie du Programme dans un autre programme ou le traduire,et copier, distribuer ou diffuser ces modifications selon les termes de l’article 1,
à condition de Vous conformer également aux conditions suivantes :Ajouter aux programmes traduits l’indication très claire qu’il s’agit
d’une traduction, ainsi que la date de la traduction et la mention du programmed’origine.
Ajouter à Vos programmes qui incorporeraient un programme protégé par laprésente Licence l’indication très claire qu’il s’agit d’un programme inclus
protégé par la Licence Publique Audiovisuelle.
Copier, traduire, distribuer ou diffuser le Programme dans son
intégralité en y incluant les génériques et les mentions de mécénat, sauf dansle cas du droit d’illustration permis dans le pays de distribution ou de diffusion.
Faire en sorte, si ce n’est pas déjà le cas, que le programme comporte lecopyright approprié en indiquant clairement la limitation de garantie, qu’il stipule
que toute personne peut librement redistribuer ou rediffuser le Programme selon lesconditions de la Licence Publique Audiovisuelle Vidéon.
Si des éléments inclus dans le programme disposent d’ayant droits différents dutitulaire des droits du programme (par exemple des musiques), il doit être fait
mention des droits appliqués à chacun de ces éléments dans le générique ou
lorsque cela n’est pas possible, sur le support de distribution (jaquette, page Webde téléchargement …). Cela est vrai quelque soit la licence d’utilisation de ceséléments, qu’il s’agisse de la Licence Publique Audiovisuelle, d’une autre cession
des droits ou de droits commerciaux classiques. Dans ce dernier cas, la distribution
ou la diffusion du programme peut entraîner la nécessité de payer des droits dediffusion de ces éléments.
Article 3.
Vous ne pouvez pas copier, traduire, céder, déposer, distribuer ou
diffuser le Programme d’une autre manière que l’autorise la Licence Publique
Audiovisuelle. Toute tentative de ce type annule immédiatement vos droitsd’utilisation du Programme sous cette Licence. Toutefois, les tiers ayant reçu
de Vous des copies du Programme ou le droit d’utiliser ces copies continueront à
bénéficier de leur droit d’utilisation tant qu’ils respecteront pleinement lesconditions de la Licence.
Article 4.
Ne l’ayant pas signée, Vous n’êtes pas obligé d’accepter cette Licence.
Cependant, rien d’autre ne Vous autorise à traduire, distribuer ou diffuser leProgramme : la loi l’interdit tant que Vous n’acceptez pas les termes de cette
Licence. En conséquence, en traduisant, distribuant ou diffusant le Programme, Vous
acceptez implicitement tous les termes et conditions de cette Licence.
Article 5.
La distribution ou diffusion d’un Programme suppose l’indication d’une licenceautorisant la copie, la traduction, la distribution ou la diffusion du Programme,
aux termes et conditions de la Licence. Vous n’avez pas le droit d’imposer derestrictions supplémentaires aux droits transmis au destinataire. Vous n’êtes pas
responsable du respect de la Licence par un tiers.
Article 6.
Si, à la suite d’une décision de Justice, d’une plainte en contrefaçon ou pour
toute autre raison (liée ou non à la contrefaçon), des conditions Vous sont386

imposées (que ce soit par ordonnance, accord amiable ou autre) qui se révèlent
incompatibles avec les termes de la présente Licence, Vous n’êtes pas pour autant
dégagé des obligations liées à celle-ci : si Vous ne pouvez concilier vos
obligations légales ou autres avec les conditions de cette Licence, Vous ne devez
pas distribuer ou diffuser le Programme.
Si une partie quelconque de cet article est invalidée ou inapplicable pour quelqueraison que ce soit, le reste de l’article continue de s’appliquer et l’intégralitéde l’article s’appliquera en toute autre circonstance.
Le présent article n’a pas pour but de Vous pousser à enfreindre des droits
ou des dispositions légales ni en contester la validité ; son seul objectif
est de protéger l’intégrité du système de distribution du Logiciel Libre. De
nombreuses personnes ont généreusement contribué à la large gamme de Programmes
Audiovisuels distribuée de cette façon en toute confiance ; il appartient à chaqueauteur/donateur de décider de diffuser ses Programmes selon les critères de son
choix.
Article 7.
Si la distribution et/ou l’utilisation du Programme est limitée dans certains pays
par la législation, le détenteur original des droits qui place le Programme sous laLicence Publique Audiovisuelle peut ajouter explicitement une clause de limitation
géographique excluant ces pays. Dans ce cas, cette clause devient une partie
intégrante de la Licence.
Article 8.
L’association Vidéon se réserve le droit de publier périodiquement des mises àjour ou de nouvelles versions de la Licence. Rédigées dans le même esprit quela présente version, elles seront cependant susceptibles d’en modifier certains
détails à mesure que de nouveaux problèmes se font jour.
Chaque version possède un numéro distinct. Si le Programme précise un numéro
de version de cette Licence et ” toute version ultérieure ”, Vous avez le choix
de suivre les termes et conditions de cette version ou de toute autre version plus
récente publiée par l’association Vidéon. Si le Programme ne spécifie aucun
numéro de version, Vous pouvez alors choisir l’une quelconque des versions publiées
par la Free Software Foundation.
Limitation de garantie
Article 9.
Parce que l’utilisation de ce Programme est libre et gratuite, aucune garantie n’est
fournie, comme le permet la loi. Sauf mention écrite, les détenteurs du copyright
et/ou les tiers fournissent le Programme en l’état, sans aucune sorte de garantie
explicite ou implicite, y compris les garanties de commercialisation ou d’adaptation
dans un but particulier. En tant que distributeur ou diffuseur Vous assumez tous lesrisques quant à la qualité et aux effets du Programme. Si l’utilisation que vous
faites du Programme est illégale par rapport à la législation du ou des pays de
distribution ou de diffusion, Vous assumez les coûts et les dépends consécutifs àvotre utilisation.
Article 10.
Sauf lorsqu’explicitement prévu par la Loi ou accepté par écrit, ni le détenteur
des droits, ni quiconque autorisé à copier, traduire redistribuer et/ou diffuser
le Programme comme il est permis ci-dessus ne pourra être tenu pour responsable detout dommage direct, indirect, secondaire ou accessoire découlant de l’utilisation
du Programme ou de l’impossibilité d’utiliser celui-ci.
Fin des termes et conditions--Comment appliquer ces directives à vos nouveaux programmes audiovisuels
Si vous réalisez un nouveau programme audiovisuel et désirez en faire bénéficier
tout un chacun, la meilleure méthode est d’en faire un Programme Libre que tout
le monde pourra redistribuer et diffuser selon les termes de la Licence Publique
Audiovisuelle.
Pour cela, insérez les indications suivantes dans votre programme (il est
préférable et plus sûr de les faire figurer dans le générique du programme ou àdéfaut sur le support de diffusion du programme : jaquette de disque ou de vidéo,
page Web de téléchargement …) :((une ligne pour donner le nom du programme))
Copyright (C) 19xx ((nom du détenteur des droits))
Ce programme est libre. Vous pouvez le traduire, le redistribuer et/ou lediffuser selon les termes de la Licence Publique Audiovisuelle publiée par387

l’association Vidéon (version 1 ou bien toute autre version ultérieure choisie parvous).
Ce programme est distribué SANS AUCUNE GARANTIE, ni explicite ni
implicite. Reportez-vous à la Licence Publique Audiovisuelle pour plus de détails.
Vous pouvez trouver une copie de la Licence Publique Audiovisuelle sur le
Web à l’adresse suivante : http://www.videontv.org/. Si ce n’est pas le cas,écrivez à l’association Vidéon, BP 221 F-91133 Ris Orangis France.
((Ajoutez également votre adresse électronique, le cas échéant ainsique votre adresse postale))((indication éventuelle des éléments inclus dans le programme dont lesdroits sont détenus par une autre personne ou organisation))
Si vous officiez en tant que réalisateur ou auteur, n’omettez pas de demander àvotre employeur, votre établissement scolaire ou autres de signer une décharge
stipulant leur renoncement aux droits qu’ils pourraient avoir sur le programme :...((employeur, école...)) déclare par la présente ne pas revendiquer dedroits sur le programme ” (nom du programme) ” réalisé par ...((nom de l’auteur)).
((signature du responsable)), ...((date)), ...((nom et qualité duresponsable)).

388

License Association des Bibliophiles Universels(1999)
License ABU-=-=-=-=-=Version 1.1, Aout 1999
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Comprehensive Open Licence (1999)
The Comprehensive Open Licence Draft (COLD)
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Design Science License (1999)
DESIGN SCIENCE LICENSETERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
Copyright © 1999-2000 Michael Stutz <stutz@dsl.org>
Verbatim copying of this document is permitted, in any medium.
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Copyright law gives certain exclusive rights to the author of a work, including therights to copy, modify and distribute the work (the ”reproductive,” ”adaptative,” and”distribution” rights).
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Free Document Dissemination Licence (1999)
Free Document Dissemination Licence -- FDDL version 1
This document may be freely read, stored, reproduced, disseminated, translated orquoted by any means and on any medium provided the following conditions are met:
every reader or user of this document acknowledges that he his aware thatno guarantee is given regarding its contents, on any account, and specificallyconcerning veracity, accuracy and fitness for any purpose;no modification is made other than cosmetic, change of representation
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comments and other additions may be inserted, provided they clearly appear
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redistributing this document to a third party requires simultaneous
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Any incompatibility of the above clauses with legal, contractual or judiciary
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GNU Free Documentation License (1999)
GNU Free Documentation License Version 0.9
DRAFT
0. PREAMBLE
The GNU Free Documentation License is a form of copyleft designed for books, such as
reference manuals and tutorials. We designed it in order to use it for documentation
about free software, but it can be used regardless of the subject matter. It canalso apply to textual works that are not released in book form. It gives users theright to copy, redistribute and modify the work, just as users have the right tocopy, redistribute and modify free software.
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This License applies to any manual or other work which contains a notice placed by
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The ”Manual”, below, refers to any such manual or work. Any member of the public is
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I. Include an unaltered copy of this license.
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Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME. Permission is granted to copy, distribute
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6. Good Practice Recommendations. In addition to the terms and conditions of thisLicense, the author and IDGB request, and strongly recommend, that redistributors of
the Open Content Work adhere to the following:a. E-mail Notification. If you intend to distribute modifications of theOpen Content Work in print media or on CD ROM, you should provide e-mail notification
to the host not later than thirty (30) days prior to your redistribution, in order togive IDGB or the author(s) sufficient time to provide you with updated material to
the Open Content Work. Your e-mail notification should include descriptions of yourmodifications.
b. Identification of Modifications. You should clearly indicate, by marking
up the document to reference the modifications, the substantive modifications anddeletions you make to the Open Content Work.
c. Free Copy of Modifications. While not mandatory, you should offer a freecopy of the modifications, whether in print or on CD-ROM, to the original author(s)and to IDGB.
7. License Options. The following provision(s) are considered part of theLicense and must be included when you reproduce the License (or its incorporation byreference) in modifications of the Open Content Work.
a. Paper/Book Versions. E-mail notification to the host is required notless than thirty (30) days prior to distribution of the Open Content Work or aderivative thereof in any standard (paper) book form.
8. General. This License constitutes the entire understanding between the parties as
to the subject matter hereof. This License shall be governed by California law andthe U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, as amended, and case law thereunder. In the event one
or more provisions contained in this License are held by any court or tribunal to beillegal or otherwise unenforceable, the remaining provisions of this License shallremain in full force and effect.
CONTRIBUTORS AGREEMENT
If you desire to contribute to the Open Content Work and the intellectual developmentof its subject matter by providing written comments, additions, supplements, fixes,
patches, or other contributions (collectively, ”Contributions”), you acknowledge andagree that:a. Your Contribution may be used by IDGB or the author(s) on a
non-exclusive basis, in whole or in part, to reproduce, modify, fix, patch, display,redistribute, and otherwise use in print or electronic media, in the Open Content
Work, revised editions, and otherwise throughout the world. You also understandthat IDGB and the author(s) cannot guarantee that either of them will use your
Contribution in any manner.
b. Based on the quality, extent, and use of your Contribution, you will
receive a general or special acknowledgment, and may receive a contributor’shonorarium, from IDGB. In this regard, you hereby give IDGB permission to acknowledge
your Contribution by posting and otherwise reproducing your name and e-mail address.
c. To your best knowledge, you represent and warrant that (i) your
Contribution does not violate any copyright, trademark, or any other registeredor common law intellectual property or proprietary right of any person or entity,(ii) all statements in your Contribution are true and accurate and do not violate
the property or privacy rights of any third party, (iii) your Contribution does notcontain information or instructions that could reasonably cause injury to person orproperty, and (iv) you have full authority to agree to the terms herein and to makethese representations.

400

Licence Publique Multimédia (1999)
Licence Publique Multimédia
Version 1.0 du lundi 1er Février 1999
Introduction
Ce document décrit les droits de diffusion pour des contenus multimédia. Il est
inspiré de la General Public License de la Free Software Foundation applicable surles logiciels libres.
Copyright © Association Vidéon
BP 221 F-91133 Ris Orangis Cedex FRANCE
La copie et la distribution de copies exactes de ce document sont autorisées, mais
aucune modification n’est permise.
Préambule
Les licences de droits de diffusion de la plupart des contenus multimédia
sont définies pour limiter ou supprimer toute liberté à l’utilisateur ou au
diffuseur. À l’inverse, la Licence Publique Multimédia (Multimédia Public License)
est destinée à vous garantir la liberté de partager et de diffuser les contenus
multimédia, et de s’assurer que ces contenus sont effectivement accessibles à tout
utilisateur.
Cette Licence Publique Multimédia s’applique aux contenus de la Banque de Programmes
Libres de droits sur Internet mise en place par l’association Vidéon, comme à tout
autre contenu dont l’auteur l’aura décidé. Vous pouvez aussi appliquer les termesde cette Licence à vos propres contenus, si vous le désirez.
Liberté des contenus multimédia ne signifie pas que vous pouvez faire ce que vous
voulez des contenus. Notre Licence est conçue pour vous assurer la liberté dediffuser des copies des contenus dans leur intégralité sans nécessiter de passer
un accord préalable supplémentaire avec le propriétaire des droits.
Afin de garantir ces droits, nous avons dû introduire des restrictions interdisantà quiconque de vous les refuser ou de vous demander d’y renoncer. Ces restrictions
vous imposent en retour certaines obligations si vous distribuez ou diffusez descopies de contenus protégés par la Licence. En d’autre termes, il vous incombera ence cas de :transmettre aux destinataires tous les droits que vous possédez, leur remettrecette Licence afin qu’ils prennent connaissance de leurs droits.
Nous protégeons vos droits de deux façons : d’abord par la protection du droit depropriété intellectuel sur le contenu, ensuite par la remise de cette Licence quivous autorise légalement à copier, distribuer, diffuser et/ou traduire le contenu
multimédia.
En outre, pour protéger chaque auteur ainsi que Vidéon, nous affirmons
solennellement que le contenu concerné ne fait l’objet d’aucune garantie. Si untiers l’inclus dans un autre contenu (par exemple une émission de télévision)
et/ou le traduit puis le redistribue ou le rediffuse, tous ceux qui le recevront
doivent savoir qu’il s’agit d’un contenu inclus et/ou traduit afin que sa
distribution ou sa diffusion n’entache pas la réputation de l’auteur du contenu.
Enfin, tout contenu libre est sans cesse menacé par la protection des droits
de reproduction et de diffusion. Nous souhaitons à tout prix éviter que desdistributeurs ou diffuseurs puissent protéger les droits de diffusion sur descontenus libres pour leur propre compte. Pour éviter cela, nous stipulons bien que
toute protection éventuelle d’un contenu doit accorder expressément à tout unchacun le libre usage du produit.
Les dispositions précises et les conditions de copie, de distribution, de diffusion
et de traduction de nos contenus sont les suivantes :Stipulations et conditions relatives à la copie, la distribution, la diffusion etla traduction
Article 0. Champ d’application
La présente Licence s’applique à tout contenu multimédia (incluant en particulier
les films, musiques, etc.) où figure une note, placée par le détenteur des droits,
stipulant que le dit contenu peut être distribué ou diffusé selon les termes dela présente Licence. Le terme contenu désigne aussi bien le contenu lui-même
que tout travail qui en est dérivé selon la loi, c’est-à-dire tout contenu ou

401une partie de celui-ci, à l’identique ou bien modifié, et/ou traduit dans une
autre langue. Chaque personne concernée par la Licence Publique Multimédia sera
désignée par le terme Vous.
Les activités autres que copie, distribution, diffusion ou traduction ne sont pas
couvertes par la présente Licence et sortent de son cadre. En particulier, lesdroits moraux sont régis par les législations nationales.
Article 1. Copie, distribution, diffusion
Vous pouvez copier, distribuer ou diffuser des copies conformes ou traduites dansleur intégralité du contenu multimédia, tel que Vous l’avez reçu, sur n’importequel support, à condition de placer sur chaque copie ou d’indiquer à la diffusion
un copyright approprié et une restriction de garantie, de ne pas modifier ou omettre
toutes les stipulations se référant à la présente Licence et à la limitation degarantie, de fournir avec toute copie du contenu un exemplaire de la Licence ou defaire référence lors d’une diffusion à l’endroit où l’auditeur ou le spectateur
peut en trouver une copie.
Vous ne pouvez demander une éventuelle rétribution financière que pour laréalisation de la copie ou de la diffusion.
Quelque soit le mode de stockage, copie, distribution ou diffusion, toute personne
ayant accès à une version numérisée du contenu doit pouvoir en faire une copie
numérisée dans un format directement utilisable, suivant les standards publics etpubliquement documentés en usage.
Article 2. Inclusion dans d’autres contenus et traduction
Vous pouvez inclure votre copie du contenu dans un autre contenu ou le traduire, etcopier, distribuer ou diffuser ces modifications selon les termes de l’article 1, à
condition de Vous conformer également aux conditions suivantes :Ajouter aux contenus traduits l’indication très claire qu’il s’agit d’une
traduction, ainsi que la date de la traduction et la mention du contenu d’origine.
Ajouter à Vos contenus qui incorporeraient un contenu protégé par laprésente Licence l’indication très claire qu’il s’agit d’un contenu inclus
protégé par la Licence Publique Multimédia.Si le contenu multimédia qui
inclu le contenu libre n’est pas libre lui même, il doit permettre de délimiter
précisément le contenu libre et permettre sa copie, distribution et diffusion
librement suivant la Licence Publique Multimédia.
Copier, traduire, distribuer ou diffuser le contenu dans son intégralité
en y incluant les génériques et les mentions de mécénat, sauf dans le cas dudroit d’illustration permis dans le pays de distribution ou de diffusion.
Faire en sorte, si ce n’est pas déjà le cas, que le contenu comporte lecopyright approprié en indiquant clairement la limitation de garantie, qu’il stipule
que toute personne peut librement redistribuer ou rediffuser le contenu selon lesconditions de la Licence Publique Multimédia de Vidéon.
Si des éléments inclus dans le contenu disposent d’ayant droits différents dutitulaire des droits du contenu (par exemple des musiques), il doit être fait
mention des droits appliqués à chacun de ces éléments dans le générique ou
lorsque cela n’est pas possible, sur le support de distribution (jaquette, page Webde téléchargement …). Cela est vrai quelque soit la licence d’utilisation de ceséléments, qu’il s’agisse de la Licence Publique Multimédia, d’une autre cession
des droits ou de droits commerciaux classiques. Dans ce dernier cas, la distribution
ou la diffusion du contenu peut entraîner la nécessité de payer des droits dediffusion de ces éléments.
Article 3. Utilisations autres que celles décrites
Vous ne pouvez pas copier, traduire, céder, déposer, distribuer ou diffuser lecontenu d’une autre manière que l’autorise la Licence Publique Multimédia. Toutetentative de ce type annule immédiatement vos droits d’utilisation du contenu souscette Licence. Toutefois, les tiers ayant reçu de Vous des copies du contenu ou ledroit d’utiliser ces copies continueront à bénéficier de leur droit d’utilisationtant qu’ils respecteront pleinement les conditions de la Licence.
Article 4. Acceptation de la licence
Ne l’ayant pas signée, Vous n’êtes pas obligé d’accepter cette Licence.
Cependant, rien d’autre ne Vous autorise à traduire, distribuer ou diffuser
le contenu : la loi l’interdit tant que Vous n’acceptez pas les termes de cette
Licence. En conséquence, en traduisant, distribuant ou diffusant le contenu, Vous
acceptez implicitement tous les termes et conditions de cette Licence.
Article 5. Transmission des droits
La distribution ou diffusion d’un contenu suppose l’indication d’une licenceautorisant la copie, la traduction, la distribution ou la diffusion du contenu,
aux termes et conditions de la Licence. Vous n’avez pas le droit d’imposer de402

restrictions supplémentaires aux droits transmis au destinataire. Vous n’êtes pas
responsable du respect de la Licence par un tiers.
La transmission du contenu libre a un tiers se fait avec transmission de cettelicence, sans modification, et en particulier sans addition de clause ou contrainte
nouvelle, explicite ou implicite liée ou non à cette transmission, autre quecelles autorisées par cette licence. En particulier, en cas d’inclusion dans unebase de données ou une collection, le propriétaire ou l’exploitant de la base ou
de la collection s’interdit tout droit de regard lié à ce stockage et concernant
l’utilisation qui pourrait être faite du contenu après extraction de la base ou dela collection, seul ou en relation avec d’autres contenus.
Article 6. Incompatibilité avec une décision de justiceSi, à la suite d’une décision de Justice, d’une plainte en contrefaçon ou pour
toute autre raison (liée ou non à la contrefaçon), des conditions Vous sont
imposées (que ce soit par ordonnance, accord amiable ou autre) qui se révèlent
incompatibles avec les termes de la présente Licence, Vous n’êtes pas pour autant
dégagé des obligations liées à celle-ci : si Vous ne pouvez concilier vos
obligations légales ou autres avec les conditions de cette Licence, Vous ne devez
pas distribuer ou diffuser le contenu.
Si une partie quelconque de cet article est invalidée ou inapplicable pour quelqueraison que ce soit, le reste de l’article continue de s’appliquer et l’intégralitéde l’article s’appliquera en toute autre circonstance.
Le présent article n’a pas pour but de Vous pousser à enfreindre des droits
ou des dispositions légales ni en contester la validité ; son seul objectif
est de protéger l’intégrité du système de distribution du Logiciel Libre.
De nombreuses personnes ont généreusement contribué à la large gamme de contenus
multimédia distribuée de cette façon en toute confiance ; il appartient à chaqueauteur/donateur de décider de diffuser ses contenus selon les critères de son
choix.
Article 7 Limitations géographiques.
Si la distribution et/ou l’utilisation du contenu est limitée dans certains pays
par la législation, le détenteur original des droits qui place le contenu sous laLicence Publique Multimédia peut ajouter explicitement une clause de limitation
géographique excluant ces pays. Dans ce cas, cette clause devient une partie
intégrante de la Licence.
Article 8. Version à utiliser de la Licence
L’association Vidéon se réserve le droit de publier périodiquement des mises àjour ou de nouvelles versions de la Licence. Rédigées dans le même esprit quela présente version, elles seront cependant susceptibles d’en modifier certains
détails à mesure que de nouveaux problèmes se font jour.
Chaque version possède un numéro distinct. Si le contenu précise un numéro
de version de cette Licence et ” toute version ultérieure ”, Vous avez le choix
de suivre les termes et conditions de cette version ou de toute autre version plus
récente publiée par l’association Vidéon. Si le contenu ne spécifie aucun numéro
de version, Vous pouvez alors choisir l’une quelconque des versions publiées par
Vidéon.
Limitation de garantie
Article 9. Risques et Garantie
Parce que l’utilisation de ce contenu est libre et gratuite, aucune garantie n’est
fournie, comme le permet la loi. Sauf mention écrite, les détenteurs des droits
sur le contenu et/ou les tiers fournissent le contenu en l’état, sans aucune sortede garantie explicite ou implicite, y compris les garanties de commercialisationou d’adaptation dans un but particulier. En tant que distributeur ou diffuseur
Vous assumez tous les risques quant à la qualité et aux effets du contenu. Si
l’utilisation que vous faites du contenu est illégale par rapport à la législation
du ou des pays de distribution ou de diffusion, Vous assumez les coûts et lesdépends consécutifs à votre utilisation.
Article 10. Responsabilité
Sauf lorsqu’explicitement prévu par la Loi ou accepté par écrit, ni le détenteur
des droits, ni quiconque autorisé à copier, traduire redistribuer et/ou diffuser lecontenu comme il est permis ci-dessus ne pourra être tenu pour responsable de tout
dommage direct, indirect, secondaire ou accessoire découlant de l’utilisation ducontenu ou de l’impossibilité d’utiliser celui-ci.
Fin des termes et conditions
Comment appliquer ces directives à vos nouveaux contenus multimédia
Si vous réalisez un nouveau contenu multimédia et désirez en faire bénéficier403

tout un chacun, la meilleure méthode est d’en faire un contenu Libre que tout
le monde pourra redistribuer et diffuser selon les termes de la Licence Publique
Multimédia.
Pour cela, insérez les indications suivantes dans votre contenu (il est préférable
et plus sûr de les faire figurer dans le générique du contenu ou à défaut sur
le support de diffusion du contenu : jaquette de disque ou de vidéo, page Web detéléchargement …) :((nom du contenu, lorsqu’il n’est pas inclus par ailleurs))
Copyright (C) ((nom du détenteur des droits)) ((année)) ((Ajoutezégalement votre adresse électronique, le cas échéant ainsi que votre adresse
postale))Ce film (ou cette musique ou...) est libre de droits de diffusion Il est destiné
aux télévisions de proximité et à favoriser l’échange
entre associations et/ou particuliers.
Vous pouvez le traduire, le redistribuer et/ou le diffuser suivant lestermes de la Licence Publique Multimédia publiée par l’association Vidéon (version
1 ou bien toute autre version ultérieure choisie par vous).
Ce programme est distribué en l’état sans aucune garantie ni explicite,
ni implicite.
Vous pouvez en obtenir une copie de la Licence : http://www.videontv.org/
Association Vidéon, BP 221 F-91133 Ris Orangis cedex France.
((indication éventuelle des éléments inclus dans le contenu dont lesdroits sont détenus par une autre personne ou organisation))
Si vous officiez en tant que réalisateur ou auteur, n’omettez pas de demander àvotre employeur, votre établissement scolaire ou autres de signer une décharge
stipulant leur renoncement aux droits qu’ils pourraient avoir sur le contenu :...((employeur, école...)) déclare par la présente ne pas revendiquer dedroits sur le contenu ” (nom du contenu) ” réalisé par ...((nom de l’auteur)).
((signature du responsable)), ...((date)), ...((nom et qualité duresponsable)).

404

Linux Documentation Project Copying License(1999)
Linux Documentation Project Copying License
Last Revision: 16 September 1999
Please read the license carefully---it is somewhat like the GNU General Public
License, but there are several conditions in it that differ from what you may be used
to. If you have any questions, please email the LDP coordinator, Guylhem Aznar.
Note: All Linux Documentation Project manuals are copyrighted by their respective
authors. THEY ARE NOT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN.
The Linux Documentation Project manuals (guides) may be reproduced and distributed inwhole or in part, subject to the following conditions:
The copyright notice above and this permission notice must be preserved completeon all complete or partial copies.
Any translation or derivative work of Linux Installation and Getting Started must
be approved by the author in writing before distribution.
If you distribute Linux Installation and Getting Started in part, instructions
for obtaining the complete version of this manual must be included, and a meansfor obtaining a complete version provided.
Small portions may be reproduced as illustrations for reviews or quotes in otherworks without this permission notice if proper citation is given.
The GNU General Public License referenced below may be reproduced under theconditions given within it.
Exceptions to these rules may be granted for academic purposes: write to the author
and ask. These restrictions are here to protect us as authors, not to restrict you as
educators and learners. All source code in Linux Installation and Getting Started isplaced under the GNU General Public License, available via anonymous FTP from the GNUarchive site.

405

Open Publication License (1999)
Open Publication License
v1.0, 8 June 1999
I. REQUIREMENTS ON BOTH UNMODIFIED AND MODIFIED VERSIONSThe Open Publication works may be reproduced and distributed in whole or in part,in any medium physical or electronic, provided that the terms of this license areadhered to, and that this license or an incorporation of it by reference (with any
options elected by the author(s) and/or publisher) is displayed in the reproduction.
Proper form for an incorporation by reference is as follows:
Copyright (c) <year> by <author’s name or designee>. This material may be
distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open
Publication License, vX.Y or later (the latest version is presently available at
http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
The reference must be immediately followed with any options elected by the author(s)and/or publisher of the document (see section VI).
Commercial redistribution of Open Publication-licensed material is permitted.
Any publication in standard (paper) book form shall require the citation of theoriginal publisher and author. The publisher and author’s names shall appear on
all outer surfaces of the book. On all outer surfaces of the book the original
publisher’s name shall be as large as the title of the work and cited as possessivewith respect to the title.
II. COPYRIGHTThe copyright to each Open Publication is owned by its author(s) or designee.
III. SCOPE OF LICENSE
The following license terms apply to all Open Publication works, unless otherwise
explicitly stated in the document.
Mere aggregation of Open Publication works or a portion of an Open Publication
work with other works or programs on the same media shall not cause this license to
apply to those other works. The aggregate work shall contain a notice specifying theinclusion of the Open Publication material and appropriate copyright notice.
SEVERABILITY. If any part of this license is found to be unenforceable in any
jurisdiction, the remaining portions of the license remain in force.
NO WARRANTY. Open Publication works are licensed and provided ”as is” without
warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied
warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose or a warranty of
non-infringement.
IV. REQUIREMENTS ON MODIFIED WORKS
All modified versions of documents covered by this license, including translations,anthologies, compilations and partial documents, must meet the following
requirements:
The modified version must be labeled as such.
The person making the modifications must be identified and themodifications dated.
Acknowledgement of the original author and publisher if applicable must be
retained according to normal academic citation practices.
The location of the original unmodified document must be identified.
The original author’s (or authors’) name(s) may not be used to assert or
imply endorsement of the resulting document without the original author’s (orauthors’) permission.
V. GOOD-PRACTICE RECOMMENDATIONSIn addition to the requirements of this license, it is requested from andstrongly recommended of redistributors that:
If you are distributing Open Publication works on hardcopy or CD-ROM, youprovide email notification to the authors of your intent to redistribute at least
thirty days before your manuscript or media freeze, to give the authors time toprovide updated documents. This notification should describe modifications, if any,made to the document.

406

All substantive modifications (including deletions) be either clearlymarked up in the document or else described in an attachment to the document.
Finally, while it is not mandatory under this license, it is consideredgood form to offer a free copy of any hardcopy and CD-ROM expression of an Open
Publication-licensed work to its author(s).
VI. LICENSE OPTIONS
The author(s) and/or publisher of an Open Publication-licensed document may
elect certain options by appending language to the reference to or copy of thelicense. These options are considered part of the license instance and must be
included with the license (or its incorporation by reference) in derived works.
A. To prohibit distribution of substantively modified versions without the explicit
permission of the author(s). ”Substantive modification” is defined as a change
to the semantic content of the document, and excludes mere changes in format or
typographical corrections.
To accomplish this, add the phrase ‘Distribution of substantively modified versionsof this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyrightholder.’ to the license reference or copy.
B. To prohibit any publication of this work or derivative works in whole or in partin standard (paper) book form for commercial purposes is prohibited unless priorpermission is obtained from the copyright holder.
To accomplish this, add the phrase ’Distribution of the work or derivative of thework in any standard (paper) book form is prohibited unless prior permission is
obtained from the copyright holder.’ to the license reference or copy.

407

Open Directory License (1999)
Open Directory License
The Open Directory is a compilation of many different editors’ contributions.
Netscape Communications Corporation (‘Netscape’) owns the copyright to thecompilation of the different contributions, and makes the Open Directory available
to you to use under the following license agreement terms and conditions (‘Open
Directory License’). For purposes of this Open Directory License, ‘Open Directory’means only the Open Directory Project currently hosted at http://dmoz.org (or atanother site as may be designated by Netscape in the future), and does not include
any other versions of directories, even if referred to as an ‘Open Directory,’ that
may be hosted by Netscape on other web pages (e.g., Netscape Netcenter).
1. Basic License. Netscape grants you a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use,
reproduce, modify and create derivative works from, and distribute and publish theOpen Directory and your derivative works thereof, subject to all of the terms andconditions of this Open Directory License. You may authorize others to exercise
the foregoing rights; provided, however, that you must have an agreement with yoursublicensees that passes on the requirements and obligations of Sections 2 and 4
below and which must include a limitation of liability provision no less protectiveof Netscape than Section 6 below.
Due to the nature of the content of the Open Directory, many third parties’ trade
names and trademarks will be identified within the content of the Open Directory(e.g., as part of URLs and description of link). Except for the limited license to
use the Netscape attribution in Section 2 below, nothing herein shall be deemed to
grant you any license to use any Netscape or third party trademark or tradename.
2. Attribution Requirement. As a material condition of this Open Directory License,
you must provide the below applicable attribution statements on (1) all copiesof the Open Directory, in whole or in part, and derivative works thereof which
are either distributed (internally or otherwise) or published (made available on
the Internet and/or internally over any internal network/intranet or otherwise),whether distributed or published electronically, on hard copy media or by anyother means, and (2) on any program/web page from which you directly link to/accessany information contained within the Open Directory, in whole or in part, or any
derivative work thereof:(a) If the Open Directory in whole or in part, or any derivative work thereof, ismade available via the Internet or internal network/intranet and/or information
contained therein is directly accessed or linked via the Internet or internal
network/intranet then you must provide the Netscape attribution statement as
described in the page(s) at the URL http://dmoz.org/become_an_editor.
(b) If the Open Directory in whole or in part, or any derivative work thereof, ismade available on any hard copy media (e.g., CD-ROM, diskette), you must place on
the packaging a notice providing Netscape attribution as described in the page(s) at
the URL http://dmoz.org/become_an_editor. If there is no ‘packaging’, the previous
attribution notice should be placed conspicuously such that it would be reasonably
viewed by the recipient of the Open Directory.
(c) If you are using or distributing the Open Directory in modified form (i.e.,with additions or deletions), you must include a statement indicating you have mademodifications to it. Such statement should be placed with the attribution notices
required by Sections 2(a) and 2(b) above.
Netscape grants you the non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use the above
identified Netscape attribution statements solely for the purpose of the above
attribution requirements, and such use must be in accordance with the usage
guidelines that may be published by Netscape from time to time as part of the above
URLs.
3. Right To Identify Licensee. You agree that Netscape has the right to publicly
identify you as a user/licensee of the Open Directory.
4. Errors and Changes. From time to time Netscape may elect to post on the page(s)at the URL http://dmoz.org/become_an_editor certain specific changes to the OpenDirectory and/or above attribution statements, which changes may be to correct errors
and/or remove content alleged to be improperly in the Open Directory. So long as you
are exercising the license to Open Directory hereunder, you agree to use commerciallyreasonable efforts to check the page(s) at the URL http://dmoz.org/become_an_editor
from time to time, and to use commercially reasonable efforts to make thechanges/corrections/deletion of content from the Open Directory and/or attribution
statements as may be indicated at such URL. Any changes to the Open Directory
content posted at the page(s) at the URL http://dmoz.org/become_an_editor are part of408

Open Directory.
5. No Warranty/Use At Your Risk. THE OPEN DIRECTORY AND ANY NETSCAPE TRADEMARKS AND
LOGOS CONTAINED WITH THE REQUIRED ATTRIBUTION STATEMENTS ARE MADE AVAILABLE UNDER
THIS OPEN DIRECTORY LICENSE AT NO CHARGE. ACCORDINGLY, THE OPEN DIRECTORY AND THE
NETSCAPE TRADEMARKS AND LOGOS ARE PROVIDED ‘AS IS,’ WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION THE WARRANTIES THAT THEY ARE MERCHANTABLE, FIT FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR NON-INFRINGING. YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR USE,
DISTRIBUTION, MODIFICATION, REPRODUCTION AND PUBLICATION OF THE OPEN DIRECTORY AND
ANY DERIVATIVE WORKS THEREOF BY YOU AND ANY OF YOUR SUBLICENSEES (COLLECTIVELY,‘YOUR OPEN DIRECTORY USE’). THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO YOUR OPEN DIRECTORY USE IS BORNE
BY YOU. YOU AGREE TO INDEMNIFY AND HOLD NETSCAPE, ITS SUBSIDIARIES AND AFFILIATESHARMLESS FROM ANY CLAIMS ARISING FROM OR RELATING TO YOUR OPEN DIRECTORY USE.
6. Limitation of Liability. IN NO EVENT SHALL NETSCAPE, ITS SUBSIDIARIES OR
AFFILIATES, OR THE OPEN DIRECTORY CONTRIBUTING EDITORS, BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT,
SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES
FOR LOSS OF GOODWILL OR ANY AND ALL OTHER COMMERCIAL DAMAGES OR LOSSES, EVEN IF
ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY THEREOF, AND REGARDLESS OF WHETHER ANY CLAIM IS BASED UPONANY CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHER LEGAL OR EQUITABLE THEORY, RELATING OR ARISING FROM THE
OPEN DIRECTORY, YOUR OPEN DIRECTORY USE OR THIS OPEN DIRECTORY LICENSE AGREEMENT.
7. California Law. This Open Directory License will be governed by the laws of theState of California, excluding its conflict of laws provisions.
Rev01-13-99

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Open Resources Magazine License (1999)
This document may be freely read, stored, reproduced, disseminated, translated orquoted by any means and on any medium provided the following conditions are met:
1. Every reader or user of this document acknowledges that is aware that no guarantee
is given regarding its contents, on any account, and specifically concerning
veracity, accuracy and fitness for any purpose.
2. No modification is made other than cosmetic, change of representation format,
translation, correction of obvious syntactic errors, or as permitted by the clauses
below.
3. Comments and other additions may be inserted, provided they clearly appear assuch; translations or fragments must clearly refer to an original complete version,
preferably one that is easily accessed whenever possible.
4. Translations, comments and other additions or modifications must be dated andtheir author(s) must be identifiable (possibly via an alias).
5. This licence is preserved and applies to the whole document with modifications andadditions (except for brief quotes), independently of the representation format.
6. Any reference to the “official version”, “original version” or “how to obtain
original versions” of the document is preserved verbatim. Any copyright notice inthe document is preserved verbatim. Also, the title and author(s) of the original
document should be clearly mentioned as such.
7. In the case of translations, verbatim sentences mentioned in (6.) are preservedin the language of the original document accompanied by verbatim translations to thelanguage of the traslated document. All translations state clearly that the author
is not responsible for the translated work. This license is included, at least in thelanguage in which it is referenced in the original version.
8. Whatever the mode of storage, reproduction or dissemination, anyone able to accessa digitized version of this document must be able to make a digitized copy in aformat directly usable, and if possible editable, according to accepted, and publicly
documented, public standards.
9. Redistributing this document to a third party requires simultaneous
redistribution of this licence, without modification, and in particular without
any further condition or restriction, expressed or implied, related or not to thisredistribution. In particular, in case of inclusion in a database or collection, theowner or the manager of the database or the collection renounces any right related tothis inclusion and concerning the possible uses of the document after extraction fromthe database or the collection, whether alone or in relation with other documents.
Any incompatibility of the above clauses with legal, contractual or judiciary
decisions or constraints implies a corresponding limitation of reading, usage, or
redistribution rights for this document, verbatim or modified.

410

W3C Document Notice (1999)
DOCUMENT NOTICE
Copyright © 1994-2000 World Wide Web Consortium, (Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio
University). All Rights Reserved. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/
Public documents on the W3C site are provided by the copyright holders under thefollowing license. The software or Document Type Definitions (DTDs) associated with
W3C specifications are governed by the Software Notice. By using and/or copying thisdocument, or the W3C document from which this statement is linked, you (the licensee)
agree that you have read, understood, and will comply with the following terms andconditions:
Permission to use, copy, and distribute the contents of this document, or the W3C
document from which this statement is linked, in any medium for any purpose andwithout fee or royalty is hereby granted, provided that you include the following on
ALL copies of the document, or portions thereof, that you use:
A link or URL to the original W3C document.
The pre-existing copyright notice of the original author, or if it doesn’t
exist, a notice of the form: ”Copyright © [$date-of-document] World Wide
Web Consortium, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut Nationalde Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All Rights
Reserved. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/” (Hypertext is preferred, but a textual
representation is permitted.)
If it exists, the STATUS of the W3C document.
When space permits, inclusion of the full text of this NOTICE should be provided. We
request that authorship attribution be provided in any software, documents, or otheritems or products that you create pursuant to the implementation of the contents ofthis document, or any portion thereof.
No right to create modifications or derivatives of W3C documents is granted pursuant
to this license. However, if additional requirements (documented in the CopyrightFAQ) are satisfied, the right to create modifications or derivatives is sometimes
granted by the W3C to individuals complying with those requirements.
THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED ”AS IS,” AND COPYRIGHT HOLDERS MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS
OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, OR TITLE;
THAT THE CONTENTS OF THE DOCUMENT ARE SUITABLE FOR ANY PURPOSE; NOR THAT THE
IMPLEMENTATION OF SUCH CONTENTS WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY THIRD PARTY PATENTS,
COPYRIGHTS, TRADEMARKS OR OTHER RIGHTS.
COPYRIGHT HOLDERS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL OR
CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF ANY USE OF THE DOCUMENT OR THE PERFORMANCE OR
IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CONTENTS THEREOF.
The name and trademarks of copyright holders may NOT be used in advertising or
publicity pertaining to this document or its contents without specific, written
prior permission. Title to copyright in this document will at all times remain withcopyright holders.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------This formulation of W3C’s notice and license became active on April 05 1999 so as toaccount for the treatment of DTDs, schema’s and bindings. See the older formulation
for the policy prior to this date. Please see our Copyright FAQ for common questions
about using materials from our site, including specific terms and conditions for
packages like libwww, Amaya, and Jigsaw. Other questions about this notice can bedirected to site-policy@w3.org.

411

Ethymonics Free Music Licence (2000)
ETHYMONICS FREE MUSIC LICENSE
Version 1, August 2000
Copyright (C) 2000, Ethymonics Limited
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license
document, but changing it is not allowed.
Preamble
The licenses for most musical works are designed to take away your freedom to sharethe music. By contrast, this Free Music License is intended to guarantee yourfreedom to make copies of a piece of music, and charge for this service if you
wish. Recipients of those copies have the same freedom. The word ”Free” in ”FreeMusic License” means the freedom to make copies. It does not mean that those copies
cannot then be sold.
This license is designed to protect and pass on the right to make copies to whoever
receives a copy. This encourages wide distribution on the artist’s behalf. You canapply this license to your own music too.
To protect the right to copy the music, it is necessary to pass on certain
requirements that must be followed when the music is copied or distributed. For
example, if you distribute a piece of music subject to this license, even if this isdone for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You mustshow them these terms so that they know their rights.
The freedom to copy is protected by two things: (1) Copyright of the music, and (2)This license that provides legal permission to copy and distribute the music.
The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and performance follow.
FREE MUSIC LICENSETERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND PERFORMANCE
1. This License applies to any musical work or other type of work which has a noticeplaced by the copyright holder saying that it may be distributed under the termsof this Free Music License. The ”Music”, below, refers to any such music or work,
whether in a recording, performance or other form of musical representation, or
any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work, in any medium,
containing the Music or a portion of it, either unaltered, modified and or
re-performed.
You may play or perform the Music publicly, for example in a broadcast, provided thatyou make available to listeners the title of the work and the name of the Artist. A
recording made as a result of the Music being played or performed is covered by thisLicense when its contents constitute a work based on the Music. If a listener wishes
to make copies of such a recording, the terms and conditions of this License must
be made available to them, along with any other information required to make anddistribute copies according to the terms and conditions of this License.
2. You may copy and distribute copies of the Music as you receive it, in any medium,provided that you:(a) conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyrightnotice;(b) keep intact all the notices that refer to this License;(c) supply, with each copy of the Music, all significant information about the Music,
including the title of the work, the name of the artist, and the names and roles of
all credited personnel;(d) supply, to each recipient of the Music, along with the Music, either a copy ofthis License or a clearly visible URL that lets the recipient know where to find a
copy of this License on the Internet.
If the information required by (a) to (d) above is not available, for example
when the Music has been received by making a recording of a performance, then thisinformation must be obtained independently and no copies can be made or distributed
without this information being included with each copy of the Music.
You may, at your option, charge a fee for the act of supplying a copy of the Music.
3. You may not copy, distribute, perform or sub-license the Music except as expressly
provided under this License. Any attempt to otherwise do so is void, and willautomatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who havereceived copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their Licenses412

terminated as long as such parties remain in full compliance.
4. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it.
However, nothing else grants you permission to copy, distribute, play or perform theMusic or any of its derivative works. Therefore, by copying distributing, playing or
performing the Music, or any of its derivative works, you indicate your acceptance of
this License to do so, and all of its terms and conditions.
5. Each time you redistribute the Music the recipient automatically receives alicense from the original licensor to copy, distribute, play and or perform the Music
subject to the terms and conditions of this License. You may not impose any further
restrictions on the recipient’s exercise of the rights granted herein. You are notresponsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
6. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of copyright infringement
or for any reason (not limited to copyright issues), conditions are imposed on you(whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of
this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you
cannot satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any otherpertinent obligations, then your rights under this License are terminated. For
example, if an existing agreement would not permit royalty-free redistribution of
the Music by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, thenthe only way to satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely fromredistributing the Music.
If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular
circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as awhole is intended to apply in other circumstances.
It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any copyright orother property right claims or to contest validity of any such claims; this section
has the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of a music distribution system,
which is implemented by copyright and license practices.
7. If an activity permitted by this License is restricted in certain countries either
for copyright or other reasons, the original copyright holder who places the Music
under this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding
those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among countries notthus excluded. In such cases, this License incorporates the limitation as if written
in the body of this License.
8. Ethymonics may publish revised and or new versions of the Free Music License fromtime to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but
may differ in detail to address new problems as they arise.
Each License is given a distinguishing version number. If the Music specifies aversion number of this License which applies to it, and ”any later version”, you havethe option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or any later
version published by Ethymonics. If the Music does not specify a version number ofthis License, you may choose any version ever published by Ethymonics.
9. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Music into another work whose distribution
conditions are different, write to the composer to ask for permission.
END OF FREE MUSIC LICENSE

413

Free Art License (2000)
Free Art License[ Copyleft Attitude ]version 1.1
Preamble:With this Free Art license, you are given the right to freely copy, distribute andtransform the artworks in the respect of the rights of the author.
Far from ignoring the rights of the author, this license recognizes them and protects
them. It reformulates their principle while making it possible for the public to makea creative use of the works of art. Whereas the use that is being made of the rightto litterary and artistic property resulted in a restriction of the public’s accessto the works of art, the goal of the Free Art license is to support it.
The intention is to open the access and to authorize the use of the resources of an
artwork by the greatest number of people. To make it available in order to multiply
the pleasures, to create new conditions of creation to amplify the possibilities ofcreation. In the respect of the authors with the recognition and the defense of theirmoral rights.
Indeed, with the arrival of digital creation, the invention of the Internet and of
free software, a new approach of creation and of production appeared. It is also theamplification of what has been tested by many contemporary artists.
Knowledge and creation are resources which must remain free to be still truly
knowledge and creation. I.e. to remain a fundamental quest which is not directly
related to a concrete application. Creating is discovering the unknown, it isinventing reality without any preoccupation about realism.
Thus, the object of art is not equivalent to the artistic object, finite anddefined as such. This is the essential goal of this Free Art license: promoting andprotecting artistic practices freed from the rules of the market economy.
-------DEFINITIONS- Artwork:
It is a common artwork which includes the initial artwork as well as all posterior
contributions (consequent originals and copies). It is created at the initiative of
the initial author who, by this license, defines the conditions according to which
the contributions are made.
- Initial artwork:
It is the artwork created by the initiator of the common artwork, which copies will
be modified by whoever wishes.
- Consequent artworks:
These are the proposals of the authors who contribute to the formation of the common
artwork by making use of the reproduction rights, of distribution and of modificationthat the license confers to them.
- Original (source or resource of work):
Dated specimen of the artwork, of its definition, of its partition or of its
program which the author present like the reference for all further updatings,
interpretations, copies or reproductions.
- Copy:Any conforming reproduction of an original as defined by this license.
- Author of the initial artwork:
It is the person who created the artwork at the origin of the tree structure of thismodified artwork. By this license, the author determines the conditions under which
this work is done.
- Contributor:
Any person who contributes to the creation of the artwork. He is the author of an
original work resulting from the modification of a copy of the initial artwork or themodification of a copy of a consequent artwork.
1. OBJECT
The object of this license is to define the conditions according to which you canenjoy this work freely.
2. EXTENT OF THE USAGE

414

This artwork is subject to copyright, and the author, by this license, specifies theextent to wich you can copy it, distribute it and modify it:
2.1 FREEDOM TO COPY (OR OF REPRODUCTION)
You have the right to copy this artwork for a personal use, for your friends, or for
any other person and employing whatever technique.
2.2 FREEDOM TO DISTRIBUTE, TO INTERPRET (OR OF REPRESENTATION)
You can freely distribute the copies of these artworks, modified or not, whatever the
support, whatever the place, for a fee or for free if you observe all the following
conditions:- attach this license to the copies, in its entirety, or indicate precisely where
the license can be found,- specify to the recipient the name of the author of the originals,- specify to the recipient where he will be able to access the originals (initial
and/or consequent). The author of the original will be able, if he wishes to, to give
you the right to diffuse the original under the same conditions as the copies.
2.3 FREEDOM TO MODIFYYou have the right to modify the copies of the originals (initial and consequent),
which can be partial or not, in the respect of the conditions set in article 2.2 inthe event of distribution (or representation) of the modified copy. The author of theoriginal will be able, if he wishes to, to give you the right to modify the originalunder the same conditions as the copies.
3. INCORPORATION OF ARTWORKAll the elements of this artwork must remain free, this is why you are not allowed tointegrate the originals in another work which would not be subject to this license.
4. YOUR AUTHOR’S RIGHTSThe object of this license is not to deny your author’s rights on yourcontribution. By choosing to contribute to the evolution of this artwork, you only
agree to give to others the same rights on your contribution as those which were
granted to you by this license.
5. DURATION OF THE licenseThis license takes effect as of your acceptance of its provisions. The factof copying, of distributing, or of modifying the artwork constitutes a tacitagreement. The duration of this license is the duration of the author’s rights
attached to the artwork. If you do not respect the terms of this license, you
automatically lose the rights that it confers to you. If the legal status to which
you are subject does not make it possible for you to respect the terms of thislicense, you cannot make use of the rights which it confers.
6. VARIOUS VERSIONS OF THE licenseThis license could be modified regularly, for its improvement, by its authors (theactors of the movement copyleft_attitude) by way of new numbered versions.
You have always the choice between being satisfied with the provisions containedin the version under which the copy was communicated to you or else, to use theprovisions of one of the subsequent versions.
7. SUB-license
Sub-licenses are not authorized by the present license. Any person who wishes to makeuse of the rights that it confers will be directly bound to the author of the initialwork.
8. THE LAW THAT IS APPLICABLE TO THE CONTRACTThis license is subject to the French law.
-------INSTRUCTIONS:- How to use the Free Art license?
To benefit from the Free Art license, it is enough to specify the following on yourartwork:[some lines to indicate the name of the artwork and to give a possible idea of what
it is.]

415

[some lines to give, if necessary, a description of the modified artwork and the nameof the author.]
Copyright © [the date] [name of the author] (if it is the case, specify the names ofthe previous authors) Copyleft: this artwork is free, you can redistribute it and/or
modify it according to terms of the Free Art license.
You will find a specimen of this license on the site Copyleft Attitude
http://copyleft.tsx.org as well as on other sites.
- Why use the Free Art license?
1 / to give access to your artwork to the greatest number of people.
2 / to let it be freely distributed.
3 / to allow it to evolve by allowing its transformation by others.
4 / to be able yourself to use the resources of an artwork when it is under Free Art
license: to copy, distribute it freely or transform it.
5 / This is not all.
Because the use of the Free Art license is also a good way to take liberties withthe system of goods generated by the dominant economy. The Free Art license offers aninteresting legal framework to prevent any abusive appropriation. It is not possible
any more to seize your work to short-circuit its creation and to make an exclusive
profit from it. It is not allowed to take advantage of the collective work being
done, not allowed to monopolize the resources of moving creation for the only benefit
of some.
The Free license Art fights for an economy suitable for art, based on sharing,exchange and the merry work. What counts in art is also and mostly what is notcounted.
- When to use the Free Art license ?
It is not the goal of the Free license Art to eliminate the copyright or the author’s
rights. Quite the opposite, it is about reformulating its relevance by taking into
account the contemporary environment. It is about allowing the right to freedom of
movement, to free copy and to free transformation of artworks. Allowing the right tothe freedom of work for art and artists.
1 / A each time you want to use or enable this right, use the Free Art license.
2 / A each time you want to create artworks so that they evolve and are freely
copied, freely distributable and freely transformable: use the Free Art license.
3 / A each time you want to have the possibility of copying, of distributing or oftransforming a work: check that it is under Free Art license. If it is not, you arelikely to be outlaw.
- To which types of artworks can the Free Art license be applied?
This license can be applied to digital artworks as well as to non digital ones. It
was born out of the observation of the world of the free software and the Internet,
but its applicability is not limited to the digital supports. You can put a painting,a novel, a sculpture, a drawing, a music, a poem, an installation, a video, a film,
a cooking recipy, a CD-Rom, a Web site, a performance, in short all creations which
can be claimed of a certain art.
- This license has a history: it was born at the meeting ” Copyleft Attitude ”
http://copyleft.tsx.org which took place at ”Accès Local” and ”Public” in Paris at
the beginning of the year 2000. For the first time, it gathered together software
specialists and actors of free software with contemporary artists and people from theart world.

416

Freedom CPU Charter (2000)~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~HEADER~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
CHARTER.txt (C) Yann GUIDON 2000 for the F-CPU project.
file created : nov. 23, 2000 by YG
current version : dec. 30, 2000 by YG$add revisions date/names here.$
Like everything in the F-CPU project, it is a basis and subject for constructive
discussions and it should not be considered as definitive. Everybody is asked tocontribute to this decisive, non-technical side of the project. I have cut&pasted
some parts of the previous ”F-CPU licence proposal”. It is still incomplete.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~INTRODUCTION~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The Freedom CPU project (F-CPU for short) is the only fully parametised 64-bit SIMD
CPU core available today in source code form. Not only it is designed to be able toreplace (one day) the best existing RISC processors in workstations, but it is being
developped in a net-community environment by students as well as professionals as ahobby. Because their work is performed for free, they want it to remain free, justlike Linux or the GNU project.
The purpose of this file is to introduce newcomers to the F-CPU design philosophy andbasic rules. More about this can be read on the F-CPU mailing list(s) and manual.
Because the GNU Public Licence covers most of the needs of the project, it is
the only licence that you have to comply with. It determines the rights and duties
concerning the distribution, modification, compilation etc. of the ”source code” ofthe processor (that is : the VHDL sources contained in this tarball).
However, the GPL doesn’t apply to the ”electronic” world and the implementors arecompletely free to do whatever they want with the derived physical devices.
You don’t have to read the rest of this file if you only want to use the files
without modification. For example, it is not revelant if you just install the bundle
and try to compile the files. However, if you modify a file, add a new file, adapt
a file for compilation with a tool, build the circuit or add features, you shouldcarefully read this text.
This charter is intended to provide developpers with guidelines, ”do and don’t” rulesthat should be followed to keep the project up and running. If a chip is built fromthe F-CPU sources then distributed, the respect of these rules will determine if thechip can be labelled as ”a F-CPU”. The use of the F-CPU source files is completely
free under the terms of the GPL, the implementation is not bound in any way, but the
F-CPU development team follows these basic rules :~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~GUIDELINES~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~o ”The name of the game is freedom”. It is forbidden to forbid others. ”One’s
freedom ends where other’s freedom starts”. These three well-known basic rules favor
reciprocal respect and positive ununcumbered work.
o We promote collaborative work, free communication and unconstrained sharing of
knowledge and know-how. This project is not a way to earn money quickly and easily,
but a mean to learn technics in a community, with the goal of redistributing theknowledge evenly.
o The distribution, modification and knowledge of the sources (non physical forms ofthe design, as opposed to the ”physical implementation” of this design) must not bebound or restricted in ANY way.
o In particular, you need not be a customer of a F-CPU vendor in order to access thesources of any F-CPU version or derived work.
o Similarly, in-progress works must be available upon a single request. An attempt toover-delay the transmission of the requested files can be interpreted as a ”guilty”
behaviour.
o The reason for this break from the GPL principle is simple : the F-CPU is not
the property of an individual or a company, but belongs to everybody. Anybody must
be able to examine, use or modify any version of any document because it is not theexclusive property of a single person. If you have your kid in a kindergarten, you
think it is normal to visit the location and see if your kid is safe or if nothing
wrong can happen. Same goes with software that we write in community.
o Do not promote secrecy. Just as the sources came to you openly, you should notpromote secrets or hidden features. It is forbidden to patent existing features used417

in the F-CPU. The F-CPU forums and mailing lists provide you with different ways toshare your remarks, additions, propositions, etc. Secrecy has no advantage in the
F-CPU community and corresponds to a self-exclusion from the group.
o Do not bind the files to a proprietary software or obscure file format. Anybody
should be able to reuse your work without being forced to acquire a specificsoftware. Standard formats are highly recommended (ISO, ANSI etc), GNU software ispreferred, freeware or public domain is ok, too. If you use a ”specific” software,
you are asked to add the required scripts or configuration files that interface the
F-CPU source with said software, and publish them under the GPL.
o When a source file is modified, the developer should update the comments andindicate his name, the date, and a short description of the modifications. It is theeasiest way to keep track of the project’s evolution. More about this can be read in
the QUALITY.TXT file. Compliance with the quality guidelines can influence whether afile or directory can be officially part of the F-CPU package.
o Please : document and comment your modifications or additions, because you canread and understand the existing sources. The lack of decent documentation, just likeobfuscated source code, slows down the development team’s work.
o When a source file is added to the F-CPU file pool, it must be distributed with
the GPL.
o Whenever a file is created or modified, the developper has to include his personal
copyright notice. It is a crucial legal protection mechanism because different
copyrights get thus inter-mixed. This strengthens the relations and dependcies
between the developpers. If a legal problem arises, a single developper can not be
attacked alone.
o All documentations written about the F-CPU and the associated software must
be distributed under the terms of the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation Licence). Thisapplies to manuals, technical books, drafts or requests for comments (RFCs).
o Personal opinions, articles or other individual expressions about the F-CPU are
well covered by the copyright laws (that means that an article or conference doesn’t
need to be bound by the GFDL).
o Even though the GLP allows to sell physical media containing GPL’d files, thepresent guidelines only allow it if the same files are available for free on theInternet with the conditions described here. This is consistent with the fact thatthe packaging of the files on a physical medium is a service only, it is not an
exception to the present guidelines.
o The modification of the F-CPU design is allowed under the sole condition that you
agree to and respect these guidelines. You do not have to register yourself in a
database, you do not need any authorization of any kind and you can do whatever you
want with the F-CPU design, except : changing the copyright notices, altering theseguidelines or use them against their spirit.
o Unlike some ”Open” standards and initiatives, you do not need to fill in a form,
pay a fee or a licence to use the F-CPU design. In return, you may not restrict thedirect access to the design that you have modified, even for the sake of collecting
statistics or polling (or, in general, collecting individual/personal data or going
through advertising pages).
o Other guidelines will be added in the future.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These recommendations can be enforced through the Copyright laws and are added to theterms of the GPL. This document is protected by the Copyright laws.

418

Licence ludique générale (2000)
Licence ludique générale
__________
Version 1 – mars 2000
Copyright © Olivier Fontan
La copie et la distribution de copies exactes de ce document sont autorisées, mais
aucune modification n’est permise.
PRÉAMBULE
Les modalités de publication de la plupart des jeux de simulation (jeux de rôle,
jeu de plateau, wargames) mettent les joueurs à la merci d’une politiqueéditoriale d’une maison d’édition qui pratique des prix disproportionnés,multiplie les «suites» indispensables à la bonne pratique du jeu, ou abandonne unesérie pour cause de non-rentabilité sans mener à bien sa démarche. A l’opposé,la licence ludique générale, directement inspirée des licences qui garantissent
la publication, la copie et la diffusion des contenus libres et ouverts (logiciels,
textes, œuvres, etc.) vise à vous garantir de partager et de modifier les jeux
librement accessibles, et ainsi de s’assurer que ces jeux sont accessibles sansfrais pour tous leurs utilisateurs. Les modèles de licences libres garantissent
juridiquement de manière satisfaisante le droit d’auteur et la liberté desutilisateurs.
Cette licence est conçue pour s’assurer que vous avez la liberté de copier etde distribuer des jeux, gratuitement ou non, et que vous recevez ou pouvez obtenirle «noyau du jeu», que vous pouvez modifier le jeu ou en utiliser des parties dansd’autres jeux libres.
Afin de protéger vos droits, cette licence doit faire des restrictions quiinterdisent à quiconque de vous refuser ces droits ou de vous demander d’yrenoncer. Ces restrictions vous imposent par conséquent certaines responsabilités
si vous distribuez des copies des jeux protégés par la Licence ludique générale
ou si vous les modifiez. Par exemple, si vous distribuez des copies d’un tel jeu,
gratuitement ou non, vous devez transmettre aux utilisateurs tous les droits que vous
possédez. Vous devez donc vous assurez qu’ils reçoivent ou qu’ils peuvent se
procurer le noyau du jeu. Vous devez leur montrer cette licence afin qu’ils soient
eux aussi au courant de leurs droits.
Enfin, tout jeu libre est sans cesse menacé par des dépôts de droitsd’auteur. Nous voulons à tout prix éviter que des distributeurs puissent
individuellement déposer la licence des jeux libres, pour leur propre compte.
Pour éviter cela, il est bien stipulé qu’un éventuel dépôt de licence doit
prévoir un usage libre pour tous. Aucun jeu diffusé sous forme libre et ouverte nepeut ainsi devenir propriétaire.
Les termes précis et les conditions pour la copie, la distribution et lamodification sont les suivants.
TERMES ET CONDITIONS DE COPIE, DISTRIBUTION ET MODIFICATION
1. – Cette licence s’applique à tout jeu ou tout autre travailcontenant une notice placée par le possesseur du copyright précisant qu’il peutêtre distribué selon les termes de cette licence ludique générale. Le « jeu »désigne soit le noyau du jeu en lui-même, soit n’importe quel travail qui en est
dérivé selon la loi. : c’est-à-dire, un ouvrage comprenant le jeu ou une partiede celui-ci, que ce soit à l’identique ou avec des modifications, et/ou traduit
dans un autre langage (à partir de maintenant, il sera considéré que le terme« modification » inclut également la « traduction »). Chaque personne pour qui
s’applique cette licence sera désignée par « vous ».
On entend par « noyau du jeu » la liste exhaustive de ce que le créateurdu jeu considère comme faisant partie de l’exemplaire original : règles, annexes,
appendices, pions, marqueurs, matériel divers. La composition de ce noyau peutvarier au gré du créateur. La description de ce noyau doit figurer dans chacun desjeux auxquels s’applique la licence ludique générale.
Les activités autres que la copie, la distribution et la modification
sortent du cadre de cette licence et ne sont pas couvertes.
2. – Vous pouvez copier et distribuer des copies conformes du jeu, telque vous l’avez reçu, sur n’importe quel support, à condition de placer sur
chaque copie un copyright approprié, la composition du noyau du jeu, et de garderintactes toutes les parties se référant à cette licence, et de fournir avec toutes

419

les copies du programme un exemplaire de cette licence ludique générale.
Vous pouvez demander une rétribution financière pour l’acte physique deréalisation de la copie.
3. – Vous pouvez publier en grand nombre, sous forme imprimée ouélectronique, un jeu libre et le diffuser, gratuitement ou non. Toute publication
doit comporter les éléments suivants :- a : toute version modifiée doit être présentée comme telle, etl’auteur et la date des modifications clairement identifiés.
- b : les auteurs et éventuels éditeurs des versions précédentes
doivent être clairement indiqués, et en premier lieu l’auteur de la version
originale. En couverture doivent être mentionnés au moins les cinq principaux
auteurs ; en pages intérieures, un historique complet des versions successives doit
figurer.
- c : la localisation de l’édition originale doit toujours êtreclairement mentionnée.
- d : toutes les obligations imposées par cette licence ludique générale
doivent être respectées, et notamment l’obligation d’insertion du texte
intégral de cette licence.
4. Il serait souhaitable que les auteurs de distributions importantes en nombre
respectent les conditions suivantes :- a : si vous souhaitez publier, à titre gratuit ou non, un jeu libre,
prévenez-en l’auteur avec suffisamment de délais pour qu’il puise vous fairebénéficier des dernières modifications.
- b : indiquez toutes les modifications substantielles, soit clairement
dans le texte, soit dans un document annexé à votre version du jeu.
- c : par courtoisie, envoyez un exemplaire de votre édition aux auteurs
du jeu.
5. Vous pouvez modifier votre copie ou vos copies du jeu ou toute portionde celui-ci, ou travail basé sur ce jeu, et copier et distribuer ces modifications
ou votre travail selon les termes de la section 2 ci-dessus à condition que vous
vous conformiez également aux conditions suivantes :- a : vous devez rajouter aux parties modifiées une indication trèsclaire que vous avez effectué des modifications, et indiquer la date de chaquechangement.
- b : vous devez distribuer sous les termes de la licence ludiquegénérale, l’ensemble de toute réalisation contenant tout ou partie du jeu, avec
ou sans modifications.
Ces conditions s’appliquent à l’ensemble des jeux dérivés. Si dessections identifiables de ce travail ne sont pas dérivées du jeu, et peuventêtre considérées raisonnablement comme indépendantes, alors cette licence nes’applique pas à ces sections, lorsque vous les distribuez seules. Mais lorsque
vous distribuez ces mêmes sections comme parties d’un ensemble cohérent dont
le reste est basé sur un jeu soumis à cette licence, alors elles sont soumiseségalement à la licence ludique générale, qui s’étend ainsi à l’ensemble duproduit, quel qu’en fut l’auteur.
Il n’est pas question dans cette section de s’approprier ou decontester vos droits sur un travail totalement écrit par vous, son but est plutôt
de s’accorder le droit de contrôler la libre distribution de tout travail dérivé
ou tout travail collectif basé sur le jeu concerné.
6. – Vous pouvez copier et distribuer le jeu (ou tout travail dérivé
selon la section 3), selon les termes des sections 2 et 3 ci-dessus, àcondition de respecter les conditions suivantes :- a : accompagner la distribution du noyau complet du jeu ; ou,- b : que la distribution comprenne une offre écrite, valable pendant au
moins les trois prochaines années, de donner à toute tierce partie qui en fera lademande, une copie du noyau du jeu pour un tarif qui ne devra pas être supérieur à
ce que vous coûte la copie, selon les termes des sections 2 et 3 ci-dessus ; ou,- c : que la distribution soit accompagnée des informations sur
l’endroit ou le noyau du jeu peut être obtenu (cette alternative n’est
autorisée que dans le cadre d’une distribution non-commerciale, et uniquementsi vous avez reçu un noyau de jeu modifié, en accord avec la sous-section b
précédente).
Si la distribution du jeu consiste à offrir un accès permettant de copierle jeu depuis un endroit particulier, alors l’offre d’un accès équivalent pourse procurer le noyau du jeu au même endroit compte comme une distribution de cenoyau du jeu, même si l’utilisateur décide de ne pas se profiter de cette offre.

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7. Vous ne pouvez pas copier, modifier, sous-licencier ou distribuer le jeu
d’une autre manière que l’autorise la licence ludique générale. Toutetentative de copier, modifier, sous-licencier ou distribuer le jeu différemment
annulera immédiatement vos droits d’utiliser le jeu sous cette licence. Toutefois,
les tierces parties ayant reçu de vous des copies du jeu ou le droit d’utiliser
ces copies, continueront à bénéficier de leur droit d’utilisation tantqu’elles respecteront pleinement les conditions de la licence ludique générale.
8. Vous n’êtes pas obligés d’accepter cette licence, puisque vous nel’avez pas signée. Cependant, rien d’autre ne vous autorise à modifier ou
distribuer le jeu ou les travaux en étant dérivés. Ces faits sont interdits parla loi, tant que vous n’acceptez pas cette licence. Par conséquent, en modifiantou en distribuant le jeu, ou tout travail basé dessus, vous indiquez implicitement
votre acceptation des termes et conditions de cette licence.
9. Chaque fois que vous redistribuez le jeu (ou tout travail en étant
dérivé), le récipiendaire reçoit une licence du détenteur original
autorisant la copie, la distribution ou la modification du jeu, selon ces termes etconditions. Vous n’avez pas le droit d’imposer de restriction supplémentaire surles droits transmis au récipiendaire. Vous n’êtes pas responsable du respect decette licence par les tierces parties.
10. Si, à la suite d’une décision de justice, il vous est imposéd’aller à l’encontre des conditions de cette licence, cela ne vous dégage pas
pour autant des obligations liées à cette licence. Si vous ne pouvez pas concilier
vos obligations légales ou toute autre obligation avec les conditions requises parcette licence, alors vous ne devez pas distribuer le jeu.
Si une portion quelconque de cette section est rendue non valide ou nonapplicable dans des circonstances particulières, le reste de la section continue
à s’appliquer et la totalité de la section s’appliquera dans les autres
circonstances.
Cette section n’a pas pour but de vous poussez à enfreindre quelquedroit ou propriété légale ou de contester leur validité, elle n’est là quepour protéger l’intégrité du système de distribution du jeu libre.
11. Si la distribution et/ou l’utilisation du jeu est limitée, danscertains pays, le propriétaire original des droits qui place le jeu et son
noyau sous la licence ludique générale peut ajouter explicitement une clause delimitation géographique excluant ces pays particuliers. Dans un tel cas, cetteclause devient une partie intégrante de cette licence.
12. Si l’auteur d’un jeu diffusé selon les termes et conditions decette licence décide de ne plus y soumettre son jeu, la licence ludique générale
continue de s’appliquer aux versions du noyau du jeu précédemment diffusés.
13. La Société des jeux libres peut publier des mises à jour ou denouvelles versions de la licence ludique générale de temps à autres. Elles seront
dans le même esprit que la précédente version, mais pourront différer danscertains détails destinés à clarifier de nouveaux problèmes pouvant survenir.
Chaque version possède un numéro de version bien distinct. Si le jeu
précise un numéro de version de cette licence et « toute version antérieure »,vous avez le choix de suivre les termes et conditions de cette version et touteautre version plus récente publiée par la Société des jeux libres. Si le jeu
ne spécifie aucun numéro de cession de cette licence, vous pouvez alors choisird’utiliser n’importe quelle licence publiée par la Société des jeux libres.
14. Si vous désirez incorporez des parties du jeu dans d’autres jeux
libres dont les conditions de distribution diffèrent, écrivez à l’auteur pourlui en demander la permission./.

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Licence pour Documents Libres (2000)
License pour Documents Libres
Version 1.1
Copyright (©) 2000 Guilde des Doctorants.
Voici le texte de la Licence pour Documents Libres proposéee par la Guilde desDoctorants. Ce document est disponible sous forme transparente en LateX et HTML,et sous forme opaque en Postscript et PDF. La source est contituéee par le fichier
LateX.
Introduction
Le but de cette licence, rédigée par la Guilde des Doctorants, est de rendre libres
les documents écrits auxquels elle s’applique. Un document est dit libre au sens oùchacun peut le recopier et le distribuer, avec ou sans modification par tous moyens
possibles et imaginables. Cette licence préserve la propriété intellectuelle del’auteur et de l’éditeur du document. Elle est aussi conçue pour éviter touterécupération commerciale d’un travail bénévole sans le consentement expressde ses auteurs. D’autres licences rendant libres des documents, des contenus,
des publications existent comme la Free Documentation Licence de la Free Software
Foundation1 et l’initiative OpenContent2. Elles sont rédigées en langue anglaiseet font parfois référence à des notions de droit américain (notion de fairuse). Nous avons très largement repris certains des points de ces licences et nous
en avons laissé certains de coté. Néanmoins ces licences comme la LDL partagent
une même vocation. La Licence pour Documents Libres (LDL), rédigée en français
est sujette à améliorations qui sont les bienvenues (voir section 7).
Cette licence a été conçue pour s’appliquer à divers types de documents quel que
soit leur support : documents techniques, notes de cours, documentation logicielle ou
encore \oe uvres de fictions. Elle inclut également un ”copyleft” pour reprendre laterminologie du GNU : tous les documents dérivés du document original héritent decette licence.
Définitions et domaine d’application
Cette licence s’applique à tout document, quelle que soit sa forme, comprenant la
notice standard associée à cette licence. La ”notification de licence” désignela section du texte où sont mentionnés le fait que le document est soumis à laprésente licence ainsi que le copyright du document. Un document est produit par unou plusieurs auteurs. Un document peut être constitué de plusieurs contributions
mises en commun. Dans ce cas, l’éditeur désigne la personne morale ou physiquequi assure la mise à disposition du document sous diverses formes. S’il n’y aqu’un auteur, il est son propre éditeur. Conformément au code de la propriété
intellectuelle, chaque auteur conserve la propriété intellectuelle sur sa
contribution. Toutefois, l’éditeur a toute liberté pour faire évoluer le document
dans le respect des dispositions de la présente licence. La notice de copyrightmentionne l’éditeur si il existe ainsi que les noms des auteurs.
On appellera ”version dérivée” tout document comprenant le document de départ
partiellement ou dans son intégralité. Une traduction est aussi considérée comme
une version dérivée.
La ”section historique” du document désigne une partie du document comprenant unhistorique de sa genèse et de son évolution. Dans le cas d’un document derivé,
la section historique contient le descriptif du ou des documents originaux etdes modifications qui y ont été apportées. Elle peut également contenir deséléments non factuels comme des considérations éthiques ou politiques concernant
l’historique et les motivations du document. La section historique peut donc n’avoir
aucun rapport avec l’objet principal du document.
La ”Page de titre” désigne pour un document imprimé la page de titre au sens usuelplus les pages de couverture. Dans le cas de documents pour lesquels ces notions
ne s’appliquent pas, c’est le texte proche de l’endroit où apparaît le titre dudocument et la fin du document. La notification de licence sera placée dans la pagede titre. La notice standard minimale aura la forme suivante :”Copyright (c) ANNEE, EDITEUR et AUTEURS. Le contenu de ce document peutêtre redistribué sous les conditions énoncées dans la Licence pour Documents
Libres version x.y ou utlérieure.”
Un document peut contenir des ”sections invariantes”. La liste des titres de sections
invariantes est précisée dans la notice spécifiant que le document est soumis àla présente licence. Par exemple :422

”Le présent document contient un certain nombre de sections invariantes
qui devront figurer sans modification dans toutes les modifications qui seront
apportées au document. Leur titres sont: TITRES DES SECTIONS INVARIANTES”.
Nous distinguons trois modes de diffusion de documents électroniques:
une forme ”transparente”, ce qui désigne tout format électronique dont
les spécifications sont disponibles dans le domaine public ou qui peut être édité
par des programmes éventuellement commerciaux largement disponibles à la date depublication du document. Exemples: ASCII, Texinfo, TeX et LaTeX, RTF, HTML, XML, SGML
avec une DTD publique.
une forme ”opaque”, ce qui désigne tout format électronique permettantl’affichage ou l’impression du document de manière simple au moyen de logiciels
du domaine public ou du moins très largement disponibles à la date de publication
du document. Un tel format ne permet pas la modification dudit document de manière
simple. Exemples: Postscript, PDF, tout format de traitement de texte nécessitant unlogiciel propriétaire, ou tout déclinaison de SGML dont la DTD n’est pas publique.
une forme ”cryptée” ce qui désigne le cas où une partie (ou la totalité) du
document est sous un format électronique qui n’est pas lisible sans la possessiond’une clef logicielle ou matérielle qui en permet le décodage. La forme cryptéepeut être utilisée à des fins d’authentification. Une fois décodé le document
peut être sous une forme transparente ou opaque. Dans le cas d’une forme cryptée,
si l’éditeur n’est plus en mesure de fournir la clef de décodage, il doit rendre
disponible le document sous une forme transparente ou opaque non cryptée.
Conditions communes aux versions modifiées et intégrales
La distribution de versions intégrales et modifiées du présent document sousn’importe quelle forme est autorisée aux conditions suivantes :Les notices de copyright spécifiant que le document est soumis à laprésente licence ainsi que les sections invariantes doivent être préservées.
Les sections invariantes ne peuvent être altérées.
Les sections historiques ne peuvent être que complétées.
La localisation3 du document original doit être mentionnée dans la pagede titre et de manière visible.
Un document disponible sous forme transparente ne peut être rediffusé
sous forme opaque seulement.
Vous ne devez mettre en place aucun dispositif visant à restreindrel’accès au document ou la possibilité de reproduire les copies que vous
distribuez. En particulier vous ne pouvez rendre disponible tout ou partie dudocument sous forme cryptée si l’auteur l’a expressément interdit.
La redistribution dans un cadre commercial ne peut être effectuée sansl’accord préalable des auteurs et de l’éditeur du document original.
Si la distribution de copies du document entraîne des frais dereproduction (photocopies, impressions, pressage de médias), vous pouvez néanmoins
les imputer au lecteur. Mais vous ne pouvez pas percevoir de droits d’exploitation
liés au contenu, ni à l’utilisation du document.
Si vous effectuez une diffusion en nombre du document (diffusion sur le WEB, par
FTP, ou à plus de 99 exemplaires imprimés, par courrier électronique, sur CDROM,ou sur d’autres supports magnétiques ou optiques), vous devez inclure une copie dela présente licence. Dans ce cas, vous devez également prévenir les éditeurs
du document original afin de définir avec eux comment veiller à la diffusion deversions à jour du document.
Modifications
Dispositions générales
Vous pouvez utiliser une partie du présent document, en la modifiantéventuellement, pour produire un nouveau document. Les dispositions de la section
3 s’appliquent.
Vous devez en plus :
lister un ou plusieurs auteurs ou entités responsables des modifications
apportées au document.
mentionner sur la page de titre que le document dérivé est une
modification d’un ou plusieurs documents originaux. Vous devez préciser leurs titres
ainsi que l’entité éditrice ou les principaux auteurs.
préciser sur la page de titre que vous êtes l’éditeur de la version
dérivée.
Vous ne devez en aucun cas :altérer une mention d’un nom d’auteur présent dans le document original
et concernant une partie que vous avez réutilisé.
donner au document dérivé le même titre que le document original sans423

autorisation de l’éditeur de celui-ci.
Nous recommandons de plus que les titres de sections ne soient altérés qu’en cas dechangement du plan du document rendues nécessaire par les modifications apportées.
Fusion ou combinaisons de documents Dans le cas où le document que vous produisez
est issu de la combinaison de plusieurs documents (après modifications éventuelles)
soumis eux aussi à la présente licence, vous pouvez remplacer les diverses
notifications de licence par une seule.
De même, vous pouvez regrouper les diverses sections historiques pour n’en fairequ’une seule. Elle doit mentionner explicitement les documents originaux auxquels
vous avez fait appel et indiquer leur localisation.
Si un des documents utilisé est disponible sous une forme transparente alors la
totalité du document dérivé doit aussi l’être.
Vous devez respecter les points listés en sections 3 et 4.1.
Inclusion dans d’autres travaux
Si le Document ou une de ses versions dérivées est agrégé avec des travaux
indépendants, de sorte que plus de 50 % du document final ainsi produit ne soit pas
soumis à la présente licence, le document final n’est pas considéré comme uneversion dérivée soumise dans son ensemble à la présente licence. Néanmoins,la ou les portions du document final qui sont issues d’un document soumis à laprésente licence restent soumis à cette licence. Les recommandations des sections 3
et 4 s’appliquent.
Traduction
Une traduction d’un document est considérée comme une version dérivée. Dans ce
cas, vous pouvez néanmoins traduire les sections invariantes. Si vous ne laissez pas
les versions originales de ces sections, vous devez prendre contact avec l’éditeurde la version originale afin d’obtenir son accord pour les traductions de ces
sections.
La Guilde proposera un certain nombre de traductions de cette licence. Si il enexiste une pour la langue cible de la traduction du document, c’est celle-ci qui
s’applique. Dans le cas contraire vous ètes invité à proposer une traduction
de la licence à la Guilde. Si vous ne le faites pas, ou si la Guilde refuse cettetraduction, c’est la version originale qui s’applique.
Dispositions concernant la garantie
Cette licence ne définit que les droits de reproduction modification et diffusion
du document. Elle n’y associe aucune garantie : sauf mention expresse du contraire,qui n’engagerait alors que l’éditeur du document, et dans la mesure où le contenu
est en conformité avec la législation française, il est entendu que ni l’éditeurni les auteurs du document ne sauraient être tenus pour responsables des éventuels
dommages et préjudices que l’utilisation du document aurait entraîné. Ces
dispositions s’appliquent même s’il s’avère que le document contient naturellementou par obsolescence une inexactitude, une imprécision ou une ambiguïté.
Tout auteur ou éditeur souhaitant doter un document soumis à la présente licencede dispositions de garantie doit joindre à chaque copie distribuée du document
un certificat de garantie précisant exactement les dispositions de garantie etmentionnant explicitement les noms des personnes morales ou physique assumant les
responsabilités de la garantie. Les dispositions de libre copie de la présente
licence restent valable pour un document avec garantie mais toute rediffusion par une
autre personne que l’auteur du certificat de garantie se fait sans garantie.
Cessation de la licence
Vous ne pouvez redistribuer le présent document ou une de ses versions dérivées
sous une licence différente. Cela entraînerait l’annulation des droits de copie,
modification et distribution du document.
En soumettant un document à la présente licence, vous conservez les droits depropriété intellectuelle liés à votre qualité d’auteur et vous acceptez que lesdroits de reproduction, diffusion et modification du document soient régis par laprésente licence.
Évolution de la licence
La Guilde des Doctorants se réserve le droit de faire évoluer la présente
licence. Elle s’assurera de la compatibilité ascendante des différentes
versions. Chaque version de la licence est numérotée.
Sauf mention explicite, il est sous entendu que si le document précise un numéro delicence, cela signifie que toute version ultérieure convient. Si aucun numéro n’est
précisé, cela signifie que toute version de la licence convient.
La présente licence s’applique à elle-même. Vous pouvez donc la modifier,424à condition d’en changer le titre et de préserver comme section historiquel’introduction. Vous devez également préserver le plan du présent document.

425

Licence Publique de Traduction (2000)
Licence Publique de Traduction(LPT-FR version 1, révision 2)(c) 2000 I.Robredo, (irm@in3activa.org)
Art.1: Résumé
La Licence publique de traduction reconnaît dans l’usage de la langue
propre la manifestation d’un droit fondamental de l’individu et contemple Internet
comme un espace libre pour l’échange des idées. Cette licence autorise la
traduction, la modification et l’adaptation en vue de sa publication sur Internet
de l’œuvre qu’elle protège, sous réserve que la version traduite ou dérivéesoit accompagnée de la même licence que la version originale. Sans préjudice dela tutelle de l’œuvre, l’auteur reconnaît aux bénéficiaires de cette licence desdroits égaux aux siens, selon leurs versions respectives.
Art.2: Définitions
1. La Licence publique de traduction (LPT) a pour but de promouvoir sur
Internet la libre circulation en libre accès des œuvres traduisibles qu’elle
protège.
2. Conformément à son titre, cette licence protège des œuvres
traduisibles, c’est à dire des œuvres dont la portée universelle dépend
nécessairement de leur traduction dans d’autres langues. Au-delà de sontitre, cette licence admet toutes les nuances de la transformation d’une œuvre
traduisible et autorise la traduction, la modification et l’adaptation del’œuvre en vue de sa publication sur Internet.
3. Le propriétaire des droits originaux protégés par cette licence est
dit « l’auteur ». Le bénéficiaire des droits reconnus par cette licence est
dit « le bénéficiaire », à la seconde personne (« Vous »). « Internet» désigne l’ensemble des réseaux interconnectés et par extension, tout
logiciel, support ou équipement permettant de consulter l’œuvre publiée surInternet.
4. Dans ce qui suit, et sauf précision contraire, le terme « œuvre »désigne sans distinction la « version originale » et la « version
transformée » de l’œuvre, c’est à dire, traduite, modifiée ou adaptée envue de sa publication pour l’Internet. La « version originale » désigne laversion où le nom de l’auteur et du bénéficiaire est le même et la «version traduite » ou « version transformée » celle où les noms del’auteur y du bénéficiaire sont différents.
5. En conformité avec les lois et accords internationaux sur les droitsd’auteur, l’auteur et le bénéficiaire de cette licence déclarent :a. La tutelle de l’auteur sur l’œuvre protégée est de nature
personnelle et unitaire.
b. La tutelle du bénéficiaire sur sa propre version ne porte pas
préjudice à la tutelle de l’auteur sur son œuvre.
c. Les droits d’exploitation de l’auteur et du bénéficiaire sur leursversions respectives sont les mêmes.
6. La LPT s’applique à toute œuvre traduisible publiée sur Internet qui
mentionne :a. L’identification de l’œuvre et le nom de l’auteur.
b. Le nom du bénéficiaire, lorsqu’il est différent de celui del’auteur.
c. La référence à la version et au texte intégral de cette licence.
Par exemple :« LPT-FR version 1 (http://www.in3activa.org/doc/fr/LPT-FR.html) »Art.3: Licence
1. D’un commun accord, l’auteur et le bénéficiaire de cette licencedéclarent :a. La publication de l’œuvre sur Internet détermine l’attribution desdroits reconnus par cette licence.
b. Une nouvelle version de l’œuvre n’annule pas les droits reconnus
par la licence aux versions précédentes de l’œuvre.
2. Vous êtes libre de traduire, de modifier et de publier l’œuvre surInternet à partir de n’importe quelle version originale ou dérivée de l’œuvre, ycompris la version originale de l’auteur, sous réserve que la version publiée soit426

accompagnée de la même licence.
3. Vous êtes libre de traduire ou réviser l’œuvre vers la même ou vers
une autre langue, et d’ajouter votre nom à la suite du nom de l’auteur. Au regard decette licence, toute version transformée de l’œuvre est entendue publiée à partirde la version originale. Le nom de l’auteur ne peut être modifié d’une version à
l’autre.
4. Vous n’êtes pas libre de publier sur Internet des parties isolées del’œuvre. Les versions partiellement traduites ou modifiées mentionneront clairementce fait, à la suite du nom du bénéficiaire. Les parties traduites ou modifiées
figureront en lieu et place du texte original dans l’œuvre intégrale.
5. Vous êtes libre de percevoir une rémunération pour la traduction, lamodification ou la publication de cette œuvre sur Internet, sous réserve que :a. l’œuvre soit publiée sur Internet sous les mêmes conditions delicence ;b. le libre accès a la consultation de l’œuvre sur Internet ne soit
pas soumis à l’identification préalable ou au paiement de quantités par lebénéficiaire.
6. L’auteur de l’œuvre se réserve à son seul profit et à celui desbénéficiaires de cette licence, l’intégralité des droits commerciaux del’œuvre, toutes versions confondues, pour tous les pays, pour toutes les langues,
et ce, quelle qu’en soit la forme, le support ou la présentation physique ou mêmejuridique qui n’aurait pas comme finalité dernière la publication de l’œuvre surInternet.
7. En l’absence d’un cadre de procédures auquel adhérer, l’auteur seréserve le droit d’autoriser selon son seul critère la version ou les versionscommercialisées dans les langues et les pays qu’il décidera, ainsi que celuide désigner les bénéficiaires qui partageront avec lui les droits commerciaux
dérivés de l’œuvre, selon des conditions établies d’un commun accord.
Art.4: Restrictions
1. Vous n’êtes pas libre de transformer, c’est à dire, de traduire, demodifier ou d’adapter cette œuvre en vue de sa publication, quels qu’en soient lesupport, la présentation ou format, par aucun moyen existant ou futur, SAUF DANSLE RESPECT DES DISPOSITIONS de cette licence. Plus particulièrement, vous n’êtes
pas libre, sans le consentement du propriétaire des droits originaux de l’œuvre
et dans les limites prévues par la Loi de votre pays, de traduire, de modifier ou
de publier cette œuvre, de la fixer sur n’importe quel support, de la diffuser par
aucun moyen ou procédé de reproduction mécanique, hertzien ou numérique. Touteautre tentative de transformation de l’œuvre en dehors des conditions prévues parcette licence EST INTERDITE et signifie la cessation immédiate des droits qui vous
sont reconnus.
2. Toute traduction, modification ou adaptation de l’œuvre en vue de sa
publication sur Internet signifie une cession automatique au profit desbénéficiaires d’une licence émise directement par le titulaire des droits
originaux de l’œuvre. Il ne vous est pas permis d’appliquer des restrictions
ou d’altérer en aucune façon les droits que cette licence reconnaît à sesbénéficiaires.
3. Votre acceptation de cette licence n’est pas requise et il n’est donc
pas nécessaire d’y apposer votre signature. Néanmoins, cette licence est la
seule qui vous autorise à transformer, c’est à dire, à traduire, à modifieret à adapter l’œuvre en vue de sa publication pour l’Internet. Ces actions
sont interdites par les lois nationales et internationales de propriété
intellectuelle. Par conséquent, le fait de traduire, de modifier ou d’adapterl’œuvre en vue de sa publication sur Internet signifie votre acceptation de toutes
et de chacune des dispositions de cette licence.
4. Vous ne pourrez en aucun cas passer outre les termes et conditions decette licence si, par suite d’une sentence d’un tribunal ou d’une dénonciation
pour infraction aux lois de votre pays, vous vous trouvez dans l’obligation (parconsentement ou pour toute autre raison) d’accepter des dispositions contrevenant
les conditions de cette licence. Si au moment de diffuser l’œuvre, impossibilité
vous est faite de respecter toutes et chacune des conditions de cette licence, laconséquence serait l’interdiction absolue de traduire, de modifier ou d’adapter
cette œuvre sans le consentement du propriétaire des droits originaux cédés parla licence.
5. Dans le cas où les termes et conditions de cette licence seraientsoumis à des restrictions dans certains pays, en raison de dispositions non prévues
par cette licence ou par des lois ou traités internationaux en vigueur dans votre
pays, le propriétaire des droits originaux de la licence pourra publier la liste despays exclus par cette licence. Si ce cas vous est applicable, alors la liste de ces
pays sera présumée incorporée au texte de cette licence.
6. Cette licence prévoit la possibilité d’en réviser ou d’en compléter427

le contenu. Les licences futures respecteront l’esprit de la version présente,mais pourront s’en éloigner sur le détail afin de répondre à des questions ou àdes problèmes nouveaux. Chacune des versions de la licence sera accompagnée d’unnuméro permettant de la distinguer des autres. Si l’œuvre en votre possession fait
référence à une version particulière de cette licence, accompagnée de la mention« et suivantes » ou « toute version ultérieure », vous pourrez choisir entre lesconditions décrites par celle-ci ou par toute autre version ultérieure. Si l’œuvre
ne fait référence à aucun numéro de version, vous pourrez opter pour n’importelaquelle des versions publiées de cette licence.
7. Les versions traduites de cette licence utiliseront comme référence laversion française publiée par le propriétaire des droits originaux de lalicence. Les versions originale et traduites de la licence seront identifiées par
un code de langue, choisit conformément à la nomenclature internationale, suivi dunuméro de version.
6. Si vous souhaitez incorporer cette œuvre au sein d’autres œuvres
libres dont les conditions seraient différentes, veuillez d’abord contacter parécrit l’auteur de la licence. La décision sera prise dans le double objectif depromouvoir cette licence, et de garantir le libre accès et la libre circulation desidées, dans le respect du droit de tout individu à s’exprimer et à communiquer
dans sa propre langue.
Art.5: Limitation de responsabilité
1. DANS LES LIMITES PRÉVUES PAR LA LOI, CETTE œUVRE VOUS EST OFFERTE SANSAUCUNE GARANTIE. SAUF INDICATION CONTRAIRE DE L’AUTEUR, L’œUVRE EST LIVRÉE« EN L’ÉTAT », SANS GARANTIE D’AUCUNE SORTE, EXPLICITE OU IMPLICITE. TOUTEGARANTIE COMMERCIALE IMPLICITE OU D’ADAPTATION AUX OBJECTIFS RECHERCHÉS ESTEXCLUE. VOUS ACCEPTEZ TOUTE LA RESPONSABILITÉ LIÉE À LA QUALITÉ OU LA FINALITÉ
DE L’œUVRE. VOUS ACCEPTEZ À VOS DÉPENDS TOUS LES FRAIS POUVANT DÉRIVER D’UN
QUELCONQUE PRÉJUDICE OU CONSÉQUENCE NON SOUHAITÉS INDUITS PAR L’œUVRE.
2. DANS LES LIMITES PRÉVUES PAR LA LOI OU ACCEPTEES PAR ÉCRIT PAR
L’AUTEUR, EN AUCUN CAS LE PROPIÉTAIRE OU LES BÉNÉFICIAIRES DE CETTE LICENCE NE
SERONT TENUS POUR RESPONSABLES DES DOMMAGES QU’ILS SOIENT GÉNÉRAUX, PARTICULIERS,
ACCIDENTELS OU INDUITS, QUI POURRAIENT DÉRIVER DE L’USAGE, DE LA TRADUCTION OU DE LA
DIFUSION DE CETTE œUVRE ET CELA, MÊME SI CE PROPRIÉTAIRE OU BÉNÉFICIAIRES VOUS
ONT INFORMÉ DE LA POSSIBILITÉ DE CES DOMMAGES.

428

Open Game License (2000)
OPEN GAME LICENSE Version 1.0a
The following text is the property of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. and is Copyright2000 Wizards of the Coast, Inc (”Wizards”). All Rights Reserved.
1. Definitions: (a)”Contributors” means the copyright and/or trademark owners who
have contributed Open Game Content; (b)”Derivative Material” means copyrighted
material including derivative works and translations (including into other computer
languages), potation, modification, correction, addition, extension, upgrade,
improvement, compilation, abridgment or other form in which an existing work may
be recast, transformed or adapted; (c) ”Distribute” means to reproduce, license,
rent, lease, sell, broadcast, publicly display, transmit or otherwise distribute;(d)”Open Game Content” means the game mechanic and includes the methods, procedures,processes and routines to the extent such content does not embody the Product
Identity and is an enhancement over the prior art and any additional content clearly
identified as Open Game Content by the Contributor, and means any work coveredby this License, including translations and derivative works under copyrightlaw, but specifically excludes Product Identity. (e) ”Product Identity” means
product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress;
artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements,
dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses,
formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual oraudio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments,
personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations,environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects,
logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark
clearly identified as Product identity by the owner of the Product Identity, andwhich specifically excludes the Open Game Content; (f) ”Trademark” means the logos,
names, mark, sign, motto, designs that are used by a Contributor to identify itself
or its products or the associated products contributed to the Open Game License by
the Contributor (g) ”Use”, ”Used” or ”Using” means to use, Distribute, copy, edit,
format, modify, translate and otherwise create Derivative Material of Open Game
Content. (h) ”You” or ”Your” means the licensee in terms of this agreement.
2. The License: This License applies to any Open Game Content that contains a noticeindicating that the Open Game Content may only be Used under and in terms of thisLicense. You must affix such a notice to any Open Game Content that you Use. No
terms may be added to or subtracted from this License except as described by the
License itself. No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game Content
distributed using this License.
3.Offer and Acceptance: By Using the Open Game Content You indicate Your acceptanceof the terms of this License.
4. Grant and Consideration: In consideration for agreeing to use this License, theContributors grant You a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licensewith the exact terms of this License to Use, the Open Game Content.
5.Representation of Authority to Contribute: If You are contributing original
material as Open Game Content, You represent that Your Contributions are Your
original creation and/or You have sufficient rights to grant the rights conveyed bythis License.
6.Notice of License Copyright: You must update the COPYRIGHT NOTICE portion of thisLicense to include the exact text of the COPYRIGHT NOTICE of any Open Game Content
You are copying, modifying or distributing, and You must add the title, the copyrightdate, and the copyright holder’s name to the COPYRIGHT NOTICE of any original OpenGame Content you Distribute.
7. Use of Product Identity: You agree not to Use any Product Identity, including
as an indication as to compatibility, except as expressly licensed in another,
independent Agreement with the owner of each element of that Product Identity. You
agree not to indicate compatibility or co-adaptability with any Trademark or
Registered Trademark in conjunction with a work containing Open Game Content
except as expressly licensed in another, independent Agreement with the owner ofsuch Trademark or Registered Trademark. The use of any Product Identity in OpenGame Content does not constitute a challenge to the ownership of that Product
Identity. The owner of any Product Identity used in Open Game Content shall retain
all rights, title and interest in and to that Product Identity.
8. Identification: If you distribute Open Game Content You must clearly indicate
which portions of the work that you are distributing are Open Game Content.
9. Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated429

versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy,
modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any versionof this License.
10 Copy of this License: You MUST include a copy of this License with every copy of
the Open Game Content You Distribute.
11. Use of Contributor Credits: You may not market or advertise the Open Game
Content using the name of any Contributor unless You have written permission from theContributor to do so.
12 Inability to Comply: If it is impossible for You to comply with any of the termsof this License with respect to some or all of the Open Game Content due to statute,
judicial order, or governmental regulation then You may not Use any Open Game
Material so affected.
13 Termination: This License will terminate automatically if You fail to comply withall terms herein and fail to cure such breach within 30 days of becoming aware of thebreach. All sublicenses shall survive the termination of this License.
14 Reformation: If any provision of this License is held to be unenforceable, suchprovision shall be reformed only to the extent necessary to make it enforceable.
15 COPYRIGHT NOTICEOpen Game License v 1.0 Copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.

430

Trackers Public License (2000)
Trackers Public License (TPL) Version 0.02 by Sven Windisch, Germany
windischs@gmx.de-= Preface =Any public license, given for Software, has its biggest interest on showing,that the Software, distributed under this license, is given with absolutely nowarranty. Rather than this, a public license for music should define Copyrights forthe musician, who composes a tracked piece of music, the musician, who wants to remix
that piece and for the audience, which wants to hear it and maybe wants to copy it
for its own use or for friends or as a gift.
We have to distinguish between the samples and the work, with which the samples
were put together. A note about the origin of the samples is indisputable, so every
tracker has to give the audience knowledge about the origin of the samples they arehearing.
The tracking-process itself is not so complicated, because it’s clear, that thiscomes from the author of the piece of music.
If you want to know more about the Copyright around tracked music look at:
http://www.united-trackers.org/resources/copyright/
I hope that this TPL will show, that the right for free information research, claimedin every democracy of the world, is worth to be realized.
20th August 2000,
Sven Windisch-= Chapter I =Downloading, Saving, Hearing
The Download of this piece oft tracked music is free. This means, that you candownload it without any fear of violating copyrights. You can save it on yourHarddisk or on any other place you want to save it. BUT ONLY FOR YOUR OWN USE ! (Forpublic use see Ch. III) And of course you, and only you, can hear it as often as
you want.
-= Chapter II =Changing, Remixing
You may change or remix the Track as you want, as long as you make a note of the Nameof the Author of the original and of the changes you made.You have to redistribute
your remix under the TPL (See HowTo). Otherway it’s not allowed to change or remixit.
-= Chapter III =Public performance
You are allowed to perform this piece of music to the public, as long as you remark
the Author. If you want to perform any remix or sth. that relates to the original you
have to remark the Name of the Author of the original and the Name of the piece ofmusic you want to perform.
-= HowTo =What to do, if I want to distribute my tracked music under the TPL?
First of all, it’s necessary, that this is really YOUR piece of tracked music.
If there’s any violation of any law, it’s not allowed to distribute this music under
the TPL. Then you have to give a remark of the origin of the samples you used, alongwith the track. You have to mark your track with your name (artist name is enough)and an adress, where the audience can reach you (e-mail adress is recommended). Avery important point is, to make clear, that this piece of tracked music is
distributed under the TPL, so you should remark it on a place, it could be seen. Then
you have to distribute it on a place where mostly everyone interested could get it
for free. (Internet should be the first place)431

Common Documentation License (2001)
Common Documentation License
Version 1.0 - February 16, 2001
Copyright © 2001 Apple Computer, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this License, butchanging or adding to it in any way is not permitted.
Please read this License carefully before downloading or using this material. By
downloading or using this material, you are agreeing to be bound by the terms of thisLicense. If you do not or cannot agree to the terms of this License, please do not
download or use this material.
0. Preamble. The Common Documentation License (CDL) provides a very simple andconsistent license that allows relatively unrestricted use and redistributionof documents while still maintaining the author’s credit and intent. To preserve
simplicity, the License does not specify in detail how (e.g. font size) or where(e.g. title page, etc.) the author should be credited. To preserve consistency,changes to the CDL are not allowed and all derivatives of CDL documents are required
to remain under the CDL. Together, these constraints enable third parties to easily
and safely reuse CDL documents, making the CDL ideal for authors who desire a wide
distribution of their work. However, this means the CDL does not allow authors to
restrict precisely how their work is used or represented, making it inappropriate forthose desiring more finely-grained control.
1. General; Definitions. This License applies to any documentation, manual or otherwork that contains a notice placed by the Copyright Holder stating that it is subject
to the terms of this Common Documentation License version 1.0 (or subsequent version
thereof) (”License”). As used in this License:
1.1 ”Copyright Holder” means the original author(s) of the Document or other owner(s)of the copyright in the Document.
1.2 ”Document(s)” means any documentation, manual or other work that has been
identified as being subject to the terms of this License.
1.3 ”Derivative Work” means a work which is based upon a pre-existing Document,such as a revision, modification, translation, abridgment, condensation, expansion,or any other form in which such pre-existing Document may be recast, transformed,
or adapted.
1.4 ”You” or ”Your” means an individual or a legal entity exercising rights under
this License.
2. Basic License. Subject to all the terms and conditions of this License, You
may use, copy, modify, publicly display, distribute and publish the Document andyour Derivative Works thereof, in any medium physical or electronic, commerciallyor non-commercially; provided that: (a) all copyright notices in the Document arepreserved; (b) a copy of this License, or an incorporation of it by reference inproper form as indicated in Exhibit A below, is included in a conspicuous location in
all copies such that it would be reasonably viewed by the recipient of the Document;and (c) You add no other terms or conditions to those of this License.
3. Derivative Works. All Derivative Works are subject to the terms of thisLicense. You may copy and distribute a Derivative Work of the Document under theconditions of Section 2 above, provided that You release the Derivative Work underthe exact, verbatim terms of this License (i.e., the Derivative Work is licensed
as a ”Document” under the terms of this License). In addition, Derivative Works ofDocuments must meet the following requirements:(a) All copyright and license notices in the original Document must be preserved.
(b) An appropriate copyright notice for your Derivative Work must be added
adjacent to the other copyright notices.
(c) A statement briefly summarizing how your Derivative Work is different fromthe original Document must be included in the same place as your copyrightnotice.
(d) If it is not reasonably evident to a recipient of your Derivative Workthat the Derivative Work is subject to the terms of this License, a statement
indicating such fact must be included in the same place as your copyright notice.
4. Compilation with Independent Works. You may compile or combine a Document or its
Derivative Works with other separate and independent documents or works to create
a compilation work (”Compilation”). If included in a Compilation, the Document or432

Derivative Work thereof must still be provided under the terms of this License, andthe Compilation shall contain (a) a notice specifying the inclusion of the Document
and/or Derivative Work and the fact that it is subject to the terms of this License,and (b) either a copy of the License or an incorporation by reference in proper form
(as indicated in Exhibit A). Mere aggregation of a Document or Derivative Work withother documents or works on the same storage or distribution medium (e.g. a CD-ROM)will not cause this License to apply to those other works.
5. NO WARRANTY. THE DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED ’AS IS’ BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
KIND, AND THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES AND/OR CONDITIONSWITH RESPECT TO THE DOCUMENT, EITHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING,
BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES AND/OR CONDITIONS OF MERCHANTABILITY,
OF SATISFACTORY QUALITY, OF FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OF ACCURACY, OF QUIETENJOYMENT, AND OF NONINFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS.
6. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER BE
LIABLE FOR ANY INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF
OR RELATING TO THIS LICENSE OR YOUR USE, REPRODUCTION, MODIFICATION, DISTRIBUTION
AND/OR PUBLICATION OF THE DOCUMENT, OR ANY PORTION THEREOF, WHETHER UNDER A THEORYOF CONTRACT, WARRANTY, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT LIABILITY OR OTHERWISE,
EVEN IF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES ANDNOTWITHSTANDING THE FAILURE OF ESSENTIAL PURPOSE OF ANY REMEDY.
7. Trademarks. This License does not grant any rights to use any names, trademarks,
service marks or logos of the Copyright Holder (collectively ”Marks”) and no suchMarks may be used to endorse or promote works or products derived from the Document
without the prior written permission of the Copyright Holder.
8. Versions of the License. Apple Computer, Inc. (”Apple”) may publish revised
and/or new versions of this License from time to time. Each version will be given a
distinguishing version number. Once a Document has been published under a particularversion of this License, You may continue to use it under the terms of thatversion. You may also choose to use such Document under the terms of any subsequentversion of this License published by Apple. No one other than Apple has the right tomodify the terms applicable to Documents created under this License.
9. Termination. This License and the rights granted hereunder will terminate
automatically if You fail to comply with any of its terms. Upon termination,
You must immediately stop any further reproduction, modification, public display,
distr ibution and publication of the Document and Derivative Works. However, all
sublicenses to the Document and Derivative Works which have been properly granted
prior to termination shall survive any termination of thisLicense. Provisions which, by their nat ure, must remain in effect beyond thetermination ofthis License shall survive, including but not limited to Sections 5, 6, 7, 9 and 10.
10. Waiver; Severability; Governing Law. Failure by the Copyright Holder to enforce
any provision of this License will not be deemed a waiver of future enforcement ofthat or any other provision. If for any reason a court of competent jurisdiction
finds any provision of this License, or portion thereof, to be unenforceable, thatprovision of the License will be enforced to the maximum extent permissible so as
to effect the economic benefits and intent of the parties, and the remainder of thisLicense will continue in full force and effect. This License shall be governed by thelaws of the United States and the State of California, except that body of California
law concerning conflicts of law.
EXHIBIT A
The proper form for an incorporation of this License by reference is as follows:”Copyright (c) [year] by [Copyright Holder’s name]. This material has been released
under and is subject to the terms of the Common Documentation License, v.1.0,
the terms of which are hereby incorporated by reference. Please obtain a copy of
the License at http://www.opensource.apple.com/cdl/ and read it before using thismaterial. Your use of this material signifies your agreement to the terms of theLicense.”433

EFF Open Audio License (2001)
EFF Open Audio License: Version 1.0
I. Preamble II. Terms of Use III. How to Use this License
I. PREAMBLE Principles
Digital technology and the Internet can empower artists to reach a worldwide audienceand to build upon each other’s ideas and imagination with extremely low production
and distribution costs. Many software developers, through both the open source
software initiative and the free software movement, have long taken advantage ofthese facts to create a vibrant community of shared software that benefits creatorsand the public.
EFF’s Open Audio License provides a legal tool that borrows from both movements
providing freedom and openness to use music and other expressive works in new
ways. It allows artists to grant the public permission to copy, distribute, adapt,and publicly perform their works royalty-free as long as credit is given to thecreator as the Original Author.
As in the software communities, this license is intended to help foster a communityof creators and performers who are free to share and build on each others’ work
while freeing their audience to share works that they enjoy with others, all for the
purpose of creating a rich and vibrant public commons.
More specifically, this license is designed to serve as a tool of freedom forartists who wish to reach one another and new fans with their original works. It
allows musicians to collaborate in creating a pool of ”open audio” that can be
freely modified, exchanged, and utilized in new ways. Artists can use this license
to promote themselves and take advantage of the new possibilities for empowerment
and independence that technology provides. It also allows the public to experience
new music, and connect directly with artists, as well as enable ”super distribution”
where the public is encouraged to copy and distribute a work, adding value to theartist’s reputation while experiencing a world of new music never before available.
Why is the EFF advocating a license?
Because, despite the fact that we are uneasy with the licensing, as opposed to sale,of both music and software, we see this particular license as a tool of freedom. Our
goal is to use the tools of copyright to free artists and audiences from the portionof current copyright law that seems, to us, to be getting in the way of copyright’s
original purpose -- the creation of a vibrant public commons of music that we all canenjoy and that artists can build upon. As part of it, we hope to demonstrate someof what we believe should be the best practices in licenses, including respect for
the rights and limitations of copyright law including fair use, first sale rights,
as well as consumer protection laws and of course freedom of speech. The aim of
this license is to use copyright tools to achieve copyright’s stated objectives of
spreading knowledge and culture while preserving incentives for the author.
For legal purposes, this document is the official license under which Open Audio is
made available for public use. The original version of this document may be found at:
http://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/eff_oal.html
Specific terms and conditions for accessing, copying, distribution, adaptation,
public performance, and attribution follow. II. TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE:
Access, Copying, Distribution, Public Performance, Adaptation, and Attribution
This license applies to any work offered by the Original Author(s) with a noticeindicating that it is released under the terms of the EFF Open Audio License,”(O)”. If used in conjunction with a sound recording (whether in digital or analog
form), this license encompasses the copyright in both the sound recording (the”master” rights) and the underlying musical composition (the ”songwriter” rights).
The Original Author retains the copyrights to works released under this license,but grants the worldwide public permission to use the work in the ways authorizedherein. Activities other than those specifically addressed below are outside thescope of this license.
1. Access, Reproduction, Distribution, Modification, and Performance
Rights. Subject to the terms and conditions of this license, the Original Author
irrevocably and perpetually grants to the public authorization to freely access,copy, distribute, modify, create derivative works from, and publicly perform thework released under this license in any medium or format, provided that Original
Author attribution be included with any copies distributed or public performancesof the work, as well as any derivative works based on the work, as further
described below.

434

2. Original Author Attribution Requirement. Original Author attribution is
generally defined as a method in the regular course of dealing that reasonably
conveys to the recipient of a copy or performance the following information:(1) The notice ”(O)” that indicates the work is released under the EFF Open Audio
license; (2) the identity of the Original Author; (3) the title of the work (atOriginal Author’s option); and (4) how the first listed Original Author may becontacted (at Original Author’s option).
Where a common, widely-adopted method for attribution is available (such as
ID3 tagging for MP3 files), Original Author attribution should be implemented
using the common, widely-adopted method. In other circumstances, Original Author
attribution may be implemented in any reasonable fashion, such as by including
attribution in the public performance, or affixing it to the physical media,
or embedding it in the digital file. See the Suggested Guidelines for general
attribution requirements for giving proper credit to the work’s Original Author
in differing circumstances.
3. Agree Not to Limit Others’ Use. Any new work that in whole or in part contains
or is derived from a work (or part thereof) made available under this license,
must itself be licensed as a whole under the terms of this license.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, mere aggregation on a volume of a storage or
distribution medium of an independently created work with one that is madeavailable under this license does not bring the other work under the scope of
this license. It is not the intent of this section to contest the rights ofothers in works created entirely by them; rather, the intent is to exercise theright to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based upon awork subject to this license.
4. Acceptance of Terms. Because you have not signed this license, you cannot be
required to accept it. But nothing besides this license grants you authorization
to copy, distribute, adapt, or publicly perform royalty-free the copyrighted
works released under it. These activities are prohibited by law without a licenseor other contractual right granted by the copyright owner. By exercising one of
the rights granted herein you indicate your acceptance of this license and agree
to be bound by all its terms and conditions.
5. License Version. This license is Version 1.0. New versions of this license
will be published from time to time at: Anyone who releases a work under the
license without specifying a version number allows the recipient to use the work
subject to the then-current version of this license
6. Civil Liberties Unrestricted. Nothing in this license is intended to reduce,
limit, or restrict any fair use, the first sale doctrine, or the public sideof the copyright bargain under copyright law, or to in any other way limit any
rights bestowed under consumer protection or other applicable laws.
7. Warranty. By offering an original work for public release under this license,
the Original Author warrants that (i) s/he has the power and authority to grant
the rights conveyed herein, and (ii) use of the work within the scope of thislicense will not infringe the copyright of any third party.
III. HOW TO USE THIS LICENSE
If you are a musician, band, or other artist and you want your creative works to beexperienced by the widest audience possible and touch the hearts and minds of thegreatest number of people around the world, the EFF Open Audio License allows yourfans and supporters to market and distribute your work through viral marketing thatcreates attention and adds value to your identity. You can also help build a common
pool of creative expression that can be accessed and improved upon by all of society.
To do so, convey or affix the following information to or about the copy or
performance of the work:
The designation ”(O)”, representing ”open” which indicates that the Original
Author(s) have released the work subject to the terms and conditions of thispublic license;
Name of work’s Original Author(s) (both the performer and the song writer);Name or title of work (at option of author);First Original Author’s specified contact means usually an email or Internet
address (at option of author);
notice, year created; and license version number.
Examples:(O) Future Tribe ”Gaian Smile” www.VirtualRecordings.com 2001 V.1.0
or(O) Future Tribe ”Imitatio Mundi” future@virtualrecordings.com 2001 V.1.0

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This license is designed to provide artists with a mechanism to promote theircreative talents and identity to millions of people through releasing certain
recordings to the public. It is also designed to serve as a tool to allow musicians
to experiment with new business models that do
not depend solely on a payment of fee-per-copy. Changing times require artists
be creative in devising new business models for assuring payment and adequate
compensation for their important contributions to society.

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HyperNietzsche Licenses (2001)
1. La Licence HyperNietzsche---------------------------Article 1 : Parties
La présente licence est concédée par ............... demeurant à.................. ci-dessous désigné l’ « auteur », à l’association
HyperNietzsche ............... ci-dessous désigné l’ « HyperNietzsche »,Article 2 : Objet
1. La présente licence a pour objet l’œuvre suivante : ................
2. Par la présente licence, l’auteur permet à l’association HyperNietzschede publier l’œuvre désignée ci-dessus sur son site Internet. Cette œuvre,
sur le site HyperNietzsche, sera soumise à la licence d’utilisation suivante :........................
3. À ce titre, l’auteur, par la présente licence, transmet à l’HyperNietzsche,à titre non exclusif, et pour la durée prévue à l’article 5 ci-dessous,ses droits de reproduction et de représentation sur son œuvre, sur tout support
numérique, et notamment le réseau Internet.
4. L’auteur transmet également son droit de traduction sur l’œuvre. Sil’œuvre est traduite, l’HyperNietzsche s’engage à fournir gratuitement àl’auteur un exemplaire numérique de la traduction, et à lui transmettre lesdroits d’exploitation sur cette même traduction.
5. La présente licence est à titre gratuit.
Article 4 : Obligations de l’HyperNietzsche
1. L’association HyperNietzsche reconnaît que la présente licence est conclue àdes seules fins d’enseignement et de recherche, et qu’elle ne peut donc céder
les droits d’exploitation transmis temporairement par l’auteur, à titre gratuit
ou onéreux, et pour une autre finalité.
2. L’HyperNietzsche s’engage à faire figurer en toute occasion le nom del’auteur sur les exemplaires de l’œuvre.
3. De façon plus générale, l’HyperNietzsche s’engage à respecter le droit
moral de l’auteur, et notamment son droit au respect à l’intégrité del’œuvre.
4. L’HyperNietzsche s’engage à mettre en œuvre sur son site le choix éditorial
opéré par l’auteur sur l’œuvre objet de la présente licence, et signalé
ci-dessus à l’article 2 . 2.
Article 5 : Durée
1. La durée de la présente licence est fixée à dix ans, à compter de la date desa formation.
2. La présente licence pourra être reconduite après le terme de dix ans. Si
l’auteur ne signale pas expressément à l’HyperNietzsche, par lettre, courrierélectronique ou autres, qu’il entend retirer son œuvre du site, la reconduction
pour dix ans supplémentaires sera alors tacitement confirmée.
Article 6 : Loi applicable
1. Tout différend pouvant naître à l’occasion de la présente licence serasoumis à une conciliation préalablement à tout recours devant les tribunaux.
2. La loi française est la seule loi compétente pour la présente licence, sanspréjudice de l’éventuelle application des conventions internationales relatives
au droit d’auteur.
2. La Licence Free Knowledge---------------------------Article 1 : Parties
La présente licence est concédée par ..............., dans les conditions
décrites ci-dessous, à tout utilisateur du site HyperNietzsche qui reproduira le
texte objet de la licence en dehors des exceptions au droit d’auteur prévues par
le Code de la propriété intellectuelle.
Article 2 : Formation
1. La présente licence se forme par voie électronique : en télédéchargeantl’œuvre qui en est l’objet, l’utilisateur l’accepte tacitement.

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2. La date de formation de la présente licence est la date du télédéchargement del’œuvre sur le site HyperNietzsche.
Article 3 : Objet
1. La présente licence a pour objet l’œuvre suivante : ................
2. L’auteur cède à l’utilisateur, à titre non-exclusif, et pour la durée dela présente licence, ses droits de reproduction, de représentation et de traduction
sur son œuvre, sur tout support, y compris numérique, et dans tout pays.
3. La présente licence est à titre gratuit.
Article 4 : Obligations de l’utilisateur-cessionnaire des droits
1. L’utilisateur s’engage à faire figurer en toute occasion le nom del’auteur, et son adresse de courrier électronique, sur les exemplaires del’œuvre.
2. De façon plus générale, l’utilisateur s’engage à respecter le droit moral
de l’auteur, et notamment son droit au respect à l’intégrité de l’œuvre.
Article 5 : Durée
1. La durée de la présente licence est fixée à dix ans, à compter de la date desa formation.
2. La présente licence pourra être reconduite après ce premier terme de dix ans :l’accord exprès de l’auteur est pour cela exigé, et pourra lui être demandépar courrier électronique.
Article 6 : Loi applicable
1. Tout différend pouvant naître à l’occasion du présent contrat sera soumis à
une conciliation préalablement à tout recours devant les tribunaux.
2. La loi française est la seule loi compétente pour la présente licence, sanspréjudice de l’éventuelle application des conventions internationales relatives
au droit d’auteur.
3. La Licence Open Knowledge---------------------------Article 1 : Parties
La présente licence est concédée par ..............., dans les conditions
décrites ci-dessous, à tout utilisateur du site HyperNietzsche qui reproduira le
texte objet de la licence en dehors des exceptions au droit d’auteur prévues par
le Code de la propriété intellectuelle.
Article 2 : Formation
1. La présente licence se forme par voie électronique : en télédéchargeantl’œuvre qui en est l’objet, l’utilisateur l’accepte tacitement.
2. La date de formation de la présente licence est la date du télédéchargement del’œuvre sur le site HyperNietzsche.
Article 3 : Objet
1. La présente licence a pour objet l’œuvre suivante : ................
2. Si l’utilisation de l’œuvre est à des fins d’enseignement et de recherche,l’auteur cède à l’utilisateur, à titre non exclusif, et pour la durée de laprésente licence, ses droits de reproduction et de représentation sur son œuvre,
sur tout support, y compris numérique. La présente licence est alors à titre
gratuit.
3. L’auteur se réserve le droit de céder ses droits de reproduction et dereprésentation sur son œuvre, dans tous les autres cas. La cession pourra être àtitre gratuit ou onéreux : l’accord exprès de l’auteur doit pour cela lui êtredemandé.
4. Dans ce dernier cas, les modalités de la cession à titre onéreux seront
précisées par l’auteur sur le site HyperNietzsche.
Article 4 : Obligations de l’utilisateur-cessionnaire des droits
1. L’utilisateur reconnaît que la présente licence est à des seules finsd’enseignement et de recherche : il ne peut céder les droits reçus temporairement
à titre onéreux pour une autre finalité.
2. L’utilisateur s’engage à faire figurer en toute occasion le nom del’auteur, et son adresse de courrier électronique, sur les exemplaires del’œuvre, ainsi que la mention « usage à des fins d’enseignement et derecherche ».

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3. De façon plus générale, l’utilisateur s’engage à respecter le droit moral
de l’auteur, et notamment son droit au respect à l’intégrité de l’œuvre.
Article 5 : Droits de l’utilisateur
1. Dans tous les cas, l’utilisateur a notamment le droit de :a) procéder à une copie, partielle ou intégrale, pour un usage strictement privé;b) procéder à des courtes citations de la présente œuvre ;c) procéder à son analyse.
2. Dans tous les cas, l’auteur a droit au respect de son droit moral, et notamment:d) de son droit au nom ;e) de son droit au respect à l’intégrité de l’œuvre.
Article 6 : Durée
1. La durée de la présente licence est fixée à dix ans, à compter de la date desa formation.
2. La présente licence pourra être reconduite après ce premier terme de dix ans :l’accord exprès de l’auteur est pour cela exigé.
Article 7 : Loi applicable
1. Tout différend pouvant naître à l’occasion du présent contrat sera soumis à
une conciliation préalablement à tout recours devant les tribunaux.
2. La loi française est la seule loi compétente pour la présente licence, sanspréjudice de l’éventuelle application des conventions internationales relatives
au droit d’auteur.
4. La licence Limited Knowledge------------------------------Article 1 : Parties
La présente licence est concédée par ..............., dans les conditions
décrites ci-dessous, à tout utilisateur du site HyperNietzsche qui reproduira le
texte objet de la licence dans le cadre des exceptions au droit d’auteur prévues
par le Code de la propriété intellectuelle.
Article 2 : Formation
1. La présente licence se forme par voie électronique : en télédéchargeantl’œuvre qui en est l’objet, l’utilisateur l’accepte tacitement.
2. La date de formation de la présente licence est la date du télédéchargement del’œuvre sur le site HyperNietzsche.
Article 3 : Objet
1. La présente licence a pour objet l’œuvre suivante : ................
2. La présente licence n’opère pas cession des droits d’auteur. L’utilisateur
détient uniquement les droits consentis au titre des exceptions légales posées
par l’article L. 122-3 du Code de la propriété intellectuelle, et présentés àl’article 5 ci-dessous.
3. Toute mise en réseau et toute rediffusion, sous quelque forme du présent texte,sont donc interdites, sauf autorisation expresse de l’auteur.
4. L’auteur se réserve le droit de céder ses droits de reproduction, detraduction et de représentation sur son œuvre, à titre gratuit ou onéreux. Les
modalités de la cession des droits d’exploitation sur l’œuvre seront
précisées par l’auteur sur le site HyperNietzsche.
Article 4 : Obligations de l’utilisateur-cessionnaire des droits
1. L’utilisateur s’engage à faire figurer en toute occasion le nom del’auteur, et son adresse de courrier électronique, sur les exemplaires del’œuvre.
2. De façon plus générale, l’utilisateur s’engage à respecter le droit moral
de l’auteur, et notamment son droit au respect à l’intégrité de l’œuvre.
Article 5 : Droits de l’utilisateur
1. Dans tous les cas, l’utilisateur a notamment le droit de :a) procéder à une copie, partielle ou intégrale, pour un usage strictement privé;b) procéder à des courtes citations de la présente œuvre ;439c) procéder à son analyse.
2. Dans tous les cas, l’auteur a droit au respect de son droit moral, et notamment:d) de son droit au nom ;e) de son droit au respect à l’intégrité de l’œuvre.
Article 6 : Loi applicable
1. Tout différend pouvant naître à l’occasion du présent contrat sera soumis à
une conciliation préalablement à tout recours devant les tribunaux.
2. La loi française est la seule loi compétente pour la présente licence, sanspréjudice de l’éventuelle application des conventions internationales relatives
au droit d’auteur.
5. La licence Système Informatique HyperNietzsche------------------------------------------------Article 1 : Parties
La présente licence est concédée par l’association HyperNietzsche, dans lesconditions décrites ci-dessous, à tout utilisateur qui entend reprendre le codesource (de type HTML, Javascript, Java, PHP, SQL ou autre) de son site Internet pour
toute création seconde.
Article 2 : Formation
La présente licence se forme par voie électronique : en reproduisant et en
utilisant le code source du site HyperNietzsche, hors des exceptions légales
prévues par le Code de la propriété intellectuelle, l’utilisateur l’accepte
tacitement. La date de formation de la présente licence est la date de la
reproduction du code source depuis le site HyperNietzsche.
Article 3 : Objet
1. La présente licence a pour objet les codes sources, tels que publiés sur leprésent site, qui constituent la partie logicielle de l’HyperNietzsche. Ces
codes sont une œuvre originale, protégée par le Code français de la propriété
intellectuelle. Ils sont la propriété exclusive de l’association HyperNietzsche,personne morale, titulaire originaire des droits d’exploitation.
2. Si l’utilisation envisagée des codes sources objets de la présente licenceest à des fins d’enseignement et de recherche, l’HyperNietzsche cède à
l’utilisateur, à titre non-exclusif, et pour la durée prévue à l’article 6,
ses droits d’exploitation, permettant de les réutiliser, les modifier, et decréer ainsi une œuvre seconde. La présente licence est alors à titre gratuit.
3. L’auteur se réserve le droit de céder son droit d’utilisation, dans tous
les autres cas, et notamment lorsque l’utilisation des codes sources objets
de la présente licence, et propriété de l’HyperNietzsche, a une finalité
commerciale. La cession sera alors à titre onéreux : les modalités de cettecession sont précisées sur le site HyperNietzsche.
Article 4 : Obligations de l’utilisateur-cessionnaire des droits
L’utilisateur reconnaît que la présente licence est à des seules finsd’enseignement et de recherche : il ne peut céder les droits, sur les codessources de l’HyperNietzsche, reçus temporairement, à titre onéreux, pour une
autre finalité.
Article 6 : Durée
1. La durée de la présente licence est fixée à dix ans, à compter de la date desa formation.
2. La présente licence pourra être reconduite après ce premier terme de dix ans :l’accord exprès de l’association HyperNietzsche, personne morale, est pour cela
exigé.
Article 7 : Loi applicable
1. Tout différend pouvant naître à l’occasion du présent contrat sera soumis à
une conciliation préalablement à tout recours devant les tribunaux.
2. La loi française est la seule loi compétente pour la présente licence, sanspréjudice de l’éventuelle application des conventions internationales relatives
au droit d’auteur.

440

Open Music Licenses (2001)
LinuxTag Green OpenMusic License
Draft v1.1, 22 April 2001
I. REQUIREMENTS ON BOTH UNMODIFIED AND MODIFIED VERSIONSThe OpenMusic works may be reproduced and distributed in whole or in part, in any
medium physical or electronic, provided that the terms of this license are adhered
to, and that this license or an incorporation of it by reference (with any options
elected by the author(s) and/or publisher) is displayed in the reproduction.
Proper form for an incorporation by reference is as follows: Copyright (c) <year>by <author’s name or designee>. This material may be distributed only subject tothe terms and conditions set forth in the Green OpenMusic License, vX.Y or later(the latest version is presently available at http://openmusic.linuxtag.org/). The
reference must be immediately followed with any options elected by the author(s)and/or publisher of the work (see section VI). The refence must be incoporated in any
publication of the work, either physical or electronic. If the work is broadcasted,or the reference can not be incorporated by physical means, the reference can beommitted with prior permission obtained from the copyright holder.
Commercial redistribution of OpenMusic-licensed material is permitted.
Any publication in physical form (like a CD) shall require the citation of theoriginal publisher and author. The publisher and author’s names shall appear on allouter surfaces of the product. On all outer surfaces of the product the original
publisher’s name shall be as large as the title of the work and cited as possessivewith respect to the title.
II. COPYRIGHTThe copyright to each OpenMusic is owned by its author(s) or designee. If the work
covered by this license is bound to a specific transport medium (see section VI), it
is possible for the author(s) or designee to publish the work on a different medium
covered by a different license.
III. SCOPE OF LICENSE
The following license terms apply to all OpenMusic works, unless otherwise explicitly
stated.
Mere aggregation of OpenMusic works or a portion of an OpenMusic work with otherworks on the same media shall not cause this license to apply to those otherworks. The aggregate work shall contain a notice specifying the inclusion of the
OpenMusic material and appropriate copyright notice.
SEVERABILITY. If any part of this license is found to be unenforceable in any
jurisdiction, the remaining portions of the license remain in force.
NO WARRANTY. OpenMusic works are licensed and provided ”as is” without warrantyof any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied
warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose or a warranty of
non-infringement.
IV. REQUIREMENTS ON MODIFIED WORKS
All modified versions of works covered by this license, including partial works
incorporated into new works, must meet the following requirements:
The modified version must be labeled as such.
The person making the modifications must be identified and the modifications
dated.
The location of the original unmodified work must be identified.
The original author’s (or authors’) name(s) may not be used to assert or imply
endorsement of the resulting work without the original author’s (or authors’)permission.
The new work has to be released under precisely this License, with themodified version filling the role of the work, thus licensing distribution andmodification of the modified version to whoever possesses a copy of it.
V. GOOD-PRACTICE RECOMMENDATIONSIn addition to the requirements of this license, it is requested from and strongly
recommended of redistributors that: If you are distributing OpenMusic works inphysical form, you provide email notification to the authors of your intent toredistribute at least thirty days before your media freeze, to give the authors timeto provide updated works. This notification should describe modifications, if any,441

made to the work. All substantive modifications (including deletions) be describedin an attachment to the work. Finally, while it is not mandatory under this license,
it is considered good form to offer a free copy of any physical form expression of an
OpenMusic-licensed work to its author(s).
VI. MEDIA LOCKING OPTION
The author(s) and/or publisher of an OpenMusic-licensed document may bind any
publication of this work or derivative works in whole or in part on a specifictransport medium (for example ”digital distribution via the Internet”). Exceptions
can be made with prior permission from the copyright holder.
This option is selected by appending language to the reference to or copy of thelicense. This option is considered part of the license instance and must be included
with the license (or its incorporation by reference) in derived works.
To accomplish this, add the phrase ”Distribution of the work or derivative of thework is restricted to <insert medium here> unless prior permission is obtained fromthe copyright holder.” to the license reference or copy.
OPEN MUSIC POLICY APPENDIX:(This is not considered part of the license.)
OpenMusic works are available in source format via the OpenMusic home page at
http://openmusic.linuxtag.org/.
OpenMusic artists who want to include their own license on OpenMusic works may do so,
as long as their terms are not more restrictive than the OpenMusic license.
If you have questions about the OpenMusic license, please contact LinuxTag e.V.,
and/or the OpenMusic Artists’ List at openartists@linuxtag.org, via email.
To subscribe to the OpenMusic Artists’ List: Send E-mail toopenartists-request@linuxtag.org.
To post to the Open Publication Authors’ List: Send E-mail toopenartists@linuxtag.org or simply reply to a previous post.
To unsubscribe from the OpenMusic Artists’ List: Send E-mail tomajordomo@linuxtag.org with the words ”unsubscribe openartists” in the body of the
mail.
--LinuxTag Yellow OpenMusic License
Draft v1.1, 22 April 2001
I. REQUIREMENTS ON BOTH UNMODIFIED AND MODIFIED VERSIONSThe OpenMusic works may be reproduced and distributed in whole or in part, in any
medium physical or electronic, provided that the terms of this license are adhered
to, and that this license or an incorporation of it by reference (with any options
elected by the author(s) and/or publisher) is displayed in the reproduction.
Proper form for an incorporation by reference is as follows: Copyright (c) <year>by <author’s name or designee>. This material may be distributed only subject tothe terms and conditions set forth in the Yellow OpenMusic License, vX.Y or later(the latest version is presently available at http://openmusic.linuxtag.org/). The
reference must be immediately followed with any options elected by the author(s)and/or publisher of the work (see section VII). The refence must be incoporated
in any publication of the work, either physical or electronic. If the work is
broadcasted, or the reference can not be incorporated by physical means, thereference can be ommitted with prior permission obtained from the copyright holder.
Any publication in physical form (like a CD) shall require the citation of theoriginal publisher and author. The publisher and author’s names shall appear on allouter surfaces of the product. On all outer surfaces of the product the original
publisher’s name shall be as large as the title of the work and cited as possessivewith respect to the title.
II. COPYRIGHTThe copyright to each OpenMusic is owned by its author(s) or designee. If the work
covered by this license is bound to a specific transport medium (see section VII), it
is possible for the author(s) or designee to publish the work on a different medium
covered by a different license.
III. SCOPE OF LICENSE
The following license terms apply to all YELLOW OpenMusic works, unless otherwise
explicitly stated.
Mere aggregation of OpenMusic works or a portion of an OpenMusic work with otherworks on the same media shall not cause this license to apply to those otherworks. The aggregate work shall contain a notice specifying the inclusion of the
OpenMusic material and appropriate copyright notice.

442

SEVERABILITY. If any part of this license is found to be unenforceable in any
jurisdiction, the remaining portions of the license remain in force.
NO WARRANTY. OpenMusic works are licensed and provided ”as is” without warrantyof any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied
warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose or a warranty of
non-infringement.
IV. REQUIREMENTS ON MODIFIED WORKS
All modified versions of works covered by this license, including partial works
incorporated into new works, must meet the following requirements:
The modified version must be labeled as such.
The person making the modifications must be identified and the modifications
dated.
The location of the original unmodified work must be identified.
The original author’s (or authors’) name(s) may not be used to assert or imply
endorsement of the resulting work without the original author’s (or authors’)permission.
The new work has to be released under precisely this License, with themodified version filling the role of the work, thus licensing distribution andmodification of the modified version to whoever possesses a copy of it.
V. GOOD-PRACTICE RECOMMENDATIONSIn addition to the requirements of this license, it is requested from and strongly
recommended of redistributors that: If you are distributing OpenMusic works inphysical form, you provide email notification to the authors of your intent toredistribute at least thirty days before your media freeze, to give the authors timeto provide updated works. This notification should describe modifications, if any,made to the work. All substantive modifications (including deletions) be describedin an attachment to the work. Finally, while it is not mandatory under this license,
it is considered good form to offer a free copy of any physical form expression of an
OpenMusic-licensed work to its author(s).
VI. COMMERCIAL USAGE
The publication of this work or derivative works in whole or in part in standard(physical) form for commercial purposes is prohibited unless prior permission is
obtained from the copyright holder. ”Commercial purposes” include any broadcasting
via commercial networks, commercial hiring, commercial copying and lending andcommercial public performance.
VII. MEDIA LOCKING OPTION
The author(s) and/or publisher of an OpenMusic-licensed document may bind any
publication of this work or derivative works in whole or in part on a specifictransport medium (for example ”digital distribution via the Internet”). Exceptions
can be made with prior permission from the copyright holder.
This option is selected by appending language to the reference to or copy of thelicense. This option is considered part of the license instance and must be included
with the license (or its incorporation by reference) in derived works.
To accomplish this, add the phrase ”Distribution of the work or derivative of thework is restricted to <insert medium here> unless prior permission is obtained fromthe copyright holder.” to the license reference or copy.
OPEN MUSIC POLICY APPENDIX:(This is not considered part of the license.)
OpenMusic works are available in source format via the OpenMusic home page at
http://openmusic.linuxtag.org/.
OpenMusic artists who want to include their own license on OpenMusic works may do so,
as long as their terms are not more restrictive than the OpenMusic license.
If you have questions about the OpenMusic license, please contact LinuxTag e.V.,
and/or the OpenMusic Artists’ List at openartists@linuxtag.org, via email.
To subscribe to the OpenMusic Artists’ List: Send E-mail toopenartists-request@linuxtag.org.
To post to the Open Publication Authors’ List: Send E-mail toopenartists@linuxtag.org or simply reply to a previous post.
To unsubscribe from the OpenMusic Artists’ List: Send E-mail tomajordomo@linuxtag.org with the words ”unsubscribe openartists” in the body of the
mail.

443

Simputer General Public License (2001)
SIMPUTERTM GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 1.3
7 May, 2001
Copyright © The Simputer Trust
The SimputerTM General Public License (the SGPL) is based on the GNU General Public
License but, due to the essential dissimilarities between the types of intellectual
property being distributed, is significantly different. Everyone is permitted tocopy and distribute verbatim copies of this license, but no-one may change it or
distribute changed versions under the same name.
Preamble:
The SGPL is meant to aid in the proliferation of SimputersTM and its innovativeextensions. The SGPL is designed to make sure that you have the right to use, modify
and extend the specifications necessary to make a SimputerTM , and to manufacture andsell SimputersTM , and that you receive the Specifications or can get it if you wantit and that you know you can do these things.
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that makes it illegal for anyone
to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender these rights. These restrictionstranslate to certain responsibilities for you if you make and sell SimputersTM , orif you modify the specifications used to make SimputersTM .
For example, if you make and sell SimputersTM , you must make sure that allpurchasers or recipients of the SimputersTM manufactured by you, receive or can get
the specifications as to how their SimputerTM was made and how it functions. If you
have made any SimputersTM based on modifications to the specifications which you
received under the SGPL, you must ensure that those modifications are eventually
published so that all purchasers and recipients thereof or other future developersof SimputersTM may benefit from the modifications you made to the SimputerTM
specifications. You must also show all purchasers and recipients of devices
manufactured by you based on these specifications, these terms so they know theirrights.
The Simputer Trust protects your rights with three steps: (1) it protects the
specifications used to manufacture SimputersTM under appropriate intellectual
property law (to the extent that existing intellectual property laws are not, in theopinion of the SimputerTM Trust, adequate to offer the degree of protection necessary
to effectively achieve the objects of the Simputer Trust, it may seek to achieveequivalent protection by using principles of contract or other applicable law);(2) it legally permits you, under the terms of this SGPL, to use the SimputerTM
specifications for the purpose of deriving modifications to the SimputerTM
specifications; and (3) it trademarks the SimputerTM brand name and allow only
those devices which have been made under and in accordance with this SGPL to be
manufactured, distributed or sold using the SimputerTM brand name. The SimputerTM
Trust recognizes that you may develop devices that are similar to the SimputerTM andthat utilize some of the features of the SimputerTM specifications, but which do notachieve all such specifications. In these circumstances the Simputer Trust will notlicense the Simputer trademark in respect of these devices but would require you torecognize the input of the SimputerTM specifications in the creation of these devices
by calling such devices SimputerisedTM devices.
Also, for each SimputerTM manufacturer’s protection, the Simputer Trust wants tomake certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for the SimputerTM
specification. The Simputer Trust also requires that every SimputerTM be manufactured
with reference to two identities: (a) the name SimputerTM and (b) the name of the
manufacturer of that particular version of the SimputerTM . The end user should know
that, (i) the product has been manufactured in accordance with the terms of this SGPL
but also that (ii) the SimputerTM specification was converted into a physical productby an identified third party so that any problems particular to that product will notreflect on the SimputerTM platform’s reputation.
Finally, any hardware specification that is distributed freely, such as is proposed
under this SGPL, will be constantly threatened by recipients of the specification
who may take out patents in respect of devices created or derived from these
specifications. We wish to prevent manufacturers of SimputersTM from individuallyobtaining patents in respect of devices based on the SimputerTM specifications or any
modification thereof as such patents will, in effect, make the hardware proprietaryand prevent proliferation of the SimputerTM platform as envisaged. It is therefore
a condition under this SGPL that no-one shall be permitted to register a patent inrespect of any device derived from or based upon the SimputerTM specifications or any
modifications thereof.

444

I.
Scope, Applicability and Definitions.
1.
This SGPL applies to the hardware specifications, printed circuit board
designs, or other works necessary for the creation of a SimputerTM and which are
distributed under the terms of this SGPL. The term Specifications when used in this
SGPL, refers to any such specifications pertaining to the hardware design and theprinted circuit board layout, as released by the Simputer Trust and published on its
website, from time to time. A Device means any device constructed or fabricated using
the Specifications or any portion, modification or derivation thereof. The terms Core
SimputerTM Specifications or CSS when used in this SGPL refers to the minimal corefeatures that any Device must necessarily display in order that such device may becalled or referred to as a SimputerTM . The Simputer Trust shall from time to time,
publish the CSS on its website with clear version numbering. The term Functional
Tests when used in this SGPL shall refer to the set of non-invasive tests which if
applied to any Device will indicate whether or not such Device satisfies the CSS. The
Simputer Trust shall from time to time, publish the Functional Tests on its website
with clear version numbering. A SimputerisedTM Device means any device which utilizes
any part, but not the whole of the Specifications or modifications thereof or whichmeets or achieves only a portion of the Core SimputerTM Specifications but not all
the Core SimputerTM Specifications. Each licensee is addressed as you.
II.
Terms and Conditions for Copying, Distribution and Modification of theSpecifications:2.
You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Specifications as you
receive it, in any medium, provided thata)you conspicuously and appropriately publish along with each copy of theSpecifications, this SGPL and the disclaimer of warranty;b)
you keep intact all the notices that refer to this SGPL and to the absence of
any warranty;c)
you give any and all recipients of the Specifications, a copy of this SGPL
along with the Specifications; andd)you ensure that no third party can receive or read the Specifications fromyou without first having read and agreed to the terms of this SGPL.
3.
You may develop devices based on modifications of the Specifications or on
modifications of any portion of the Specifications. You are not required, under
the terms of this SGPL, to distribute any modifications to the Specifications if
you have not commercially distributed any devices created based on the modified
Specifications. However, if and when you do distribute modified Specifications or if
you manufacture or distribute any devices based on the Specifications, you shall only
do so subject to the terms and conditions of Section 2 above as well as each of thefollowing conditions:a)you must cause the modified Specifications to carry prominent notices statingthat you have changed the Specifications, as well as full details about yourself,
including your name, permanent physical address, email address and other contact
details.
b)
you must cause to be included along with the modified Specifications, thedate and details of the change you have introduced to the Specifications, including
details of the version of the Specifications from which the changes were made.
c)
you must allow any modified Specifications that you distribute or publish,that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Specifications or any part,modification or derivation thereof, to be copied, distributed or modified as a wholeat no charge by all third parties under the terms of this SGPL and to allow all suchthird parties who access these modified Specifications to create devices based upon
the modified Specifications under and in accordance with the terms of this SGPL.
These requirements apply to the Specifications as a whole. If you have developed
devices that can function independently and are capable of being connected to or
externally used in conjunction with SimputersTM , then this SGPL, and its terms,
do not apply to the specifications for the manufacture of those devices. However, if
you have modified the Specifications to incorporate any device or devices within the
body of the SimputerTM , or if you have developed specifications for devices designed
to be incorporated within the body of the SimputerTM , all such specifications,modified Specifications and devices created based thereon, shall be governed bythis SGPL. When you distribute these specifications or modified Specifications,the permissions granted to other recipients under such SGPL shall extend to theentire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. The mere
aggregation of specifications for the manufacture of other devices not based on theSpecifications with the Specifications (or with a modification of the Specifications)does not bring such other specifications under the scope of this SGPL.
At all times, the Specifications, the modified Specifications and all other445intellectual property distributed under the terms of this SGPL shall constitute thevaluable intellectual property of the Simputer Trust notwithstanding the rights of
the author or creator of such intellectual property therein. You shall not registera patent or other intellectual property right in respect of the Specifications or
any modifications or derivations thereof, nor shall you register any intellectual
property right in respect of any Devices built using or relying upon theSpecification or any modifications or derivations thereof. To the extent required,
the authors of such intellectual property shall, through an appropriate deed of
assignment or other such document, transfer and assign the intellectual property toand in favour of the Simputer Trust at the time of putting such intellectual property
in the public domain.
III.
Development and Design of Devices
4.
You may, subject to the conditions of this SGPL, design and build a Device
so long as you provide each person to whom such Device is given, with a copy of thisSGPL as well as with a copy of the Specifications.
5.
Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained herein, you shallnot commence any commercial activity in relation to any Device, whether it be
manufacture, distribution, sale, or any other such activity, without first obtaining
from the Simputer Trust, a license in accordance with the provisions of Section 7 ofthis SGPL.
6.
You may design and build a Device based on any modifications to theSpecifications provided that in the event you commence any commercial activity inrelation to the Device you shall, no later than twelve months from the date on which
the first sale of such Device is completed,a)notwithstanding anything contained in Section 3, publish or cause to be
published a copy of the modified Specifications based upon which the Device wasbuilt; andb)deliver a copy of the modified Specifications to the Simputer Trust.
During the twelve month period from the date on which you complete the first sale ofa Device till the date on which you are required, under the terms of this Section 6,
to publish the modifications of the Specifications, you shall, subject to the termsof Part II hereunder, be entitled to exclusively manufacture and sell Devices basedon the modified Specifications. In the event any dispute arises in respect of theactual date of the first commercial sale of the Device, the decision of the Simputer
Trust in respect thereof shall be final and binding.
IV.
Terms and Conditions for Distribution and Manufacture of SimputersTM or
SimputerisedTM Devices:7.
If you have developed a prototype of a Device that satisfies the CSS,
you must approach the Simputer Trust for a license to distribute and manufacture
SimputersTM before you complete the commercial sale of any such Device. If you havedeveloped a prototype of a SimputerisedTM Device that does not satisfy the CSS,
you must approach the Simputer Trust for a license to distribute and manufacture
SimputerisedTM Devices before you complete the first commercial sale of any such
Device. You will not be entitled to distribute or manufacture any Device under the
SimputerTM brand name or any modification or colourable imitation thereof or tocall such Device a SimputerTM or a SimputerisedTM Device unless you have received alicense from the Simputer Trust for such manufacture and distribution.
8.
In order to obtain a license for the manufacture of SimputersTM , you must
provide the Simputer Trust with a fully functional prototype Device. The Simputer
Trust shall perform the Functional Tests on such Device and, if, in the opinion of
the Simputer Trust, the Device satisfies the CSS, the Simputer Trust will grant you alicense to manufacture and distribute SimputersTM and to use the SimputerTM trademark
in association with such Device, subject and in accordance with the terms of this
SGPL. The Simputer Trust may, at its discretion, charge you a one-time lump-sum
license fee in respect of such license to manufacture and distribute and for theuse of the SimputerTM trademark. In order to obtain a license for the manufactureof a SimputerisedTM Device, the Simputer Trust may, at its discretion, charge you a
one-time license fee payable in respect of such license to manufacture and distributesuch SimputerisedTM Device and for the use of the term SimputerisedTM as a prefix tothe brand name, in relation thereto.
9.
Any license that may be granted to you by the Simputer Trust in accordancewith the terms of Section 8, shall be so granted on the following conditions:a)
All SimputersTM manufactured or distributed under the SimputerTM trade markshall fulfill each and every one of the conditions set out in the most recent versionof the CSS as has been published on the date of manufacture of such Device. Thisobligation shall not apply to SimputerisedTM Devices.
b)
The SimputerTM trade mark as well as the logo shall be displayed on all
SimputersTM as well as in all promotional material, documentation, brochures,446

notices, etc. relating thereto, strictly in accordance with the instructions
published by the Simputer Trust in this regard from time to time. All SimputerisedTM
Devices shall utilise a brand name distinct from the SimputerTM trade mark, but shallprefix such brand name with the term SimputerisedTM both on the Devices as well as inall promotional material, documentation, brochures, notices, etc. relating thereto,
strictly in accordance with the instructions published by the Simputer Trust in thisregard from time to time. All SimputersTM and SimputerisedTM Devices shall also bear,in a prominent place on the front panel of the Device, details of the name of the
manufacturer thereof.
c)
You shall not be entitled to sub-license the rights under this SGPL withregard to manufacture and distribution of SimputersTM or SimputerisedTM Devices or
the use of the SimputerTM trade mark, or any modifications or colourable imitations
thereof without the express written consent of the Simputer Trust. You shall not
be allowed to utilise the SimputerTM trade mark or any adaptations or colourable
imitations thereof in respect of any Device in respect of which a manufacturing
and distribution license has not been granted by the SimputerTM Trust. Nothing
contained herein shall limit your right to appoint tooling, manufacturing andfabrication agents as well as marketing agents and distributors in respect of theDevices provided that you retain ultimate control over the actual manufacture of theDevices and that all such agents and distributors agree to be bound by the terms andconditions of the SGPL.
d)
You shall be obliged to abide by and adhere to all the terms of this SGPL. In
addition a breach of any of the terms of the SGPL by any person who has received,from you, a copy of the Specifications without the SGPL shall be deemed to be abreach of the terms of this SGPL.
e)
The license of the SimputerTM trade mark or the right to utilise the
SimputerisedTM prefix shall not be limited in point in time and shall not beterminated except in the event of a breach of any of the terms of the license of this
SGPL.
f)
You shall ensure that the manufacture or distribution of the Device does not
infringe or violate any existing intellectual property rights of any third party. To
the extent that the Device incorporates any third party intellectual property,
the Specifications provided along with the Device should name the licensor of suchintellectual property and list the specifications thereof in sufficient detail as
would be necessary for any subsequent licensee of the Specifications to be able toobtain a license for such intellectual property from that licensor.
In the event you are found, at any point in time, to be in breach of any of theterms and conditions set out in this Clause 9, the Simputer Trust shall be entitled
to terminate, with immediate effect, the manufacturing and distribution license as
well as the trade mark license under the terms of which you have been permitted to
distribute and manufacture SimputersTM or SimputerisedTM Devices. From that dateonwards, you shall not be permitted to legally denote any Device manufactured or
distributed by you, as being a SimputerTM or a SimputerisedTM Device or to represent,
whether expressly or through reasonable implication, that any such Devices arederived from, or similar to, SimputersTM . You hereby authorize the Simputer Trust,in the event of such termination of the manufacturing and distribution license or the
SimputerTM trade mark license, to publish, disclose or otherwise generally make known
the fact that your license has been terminated and that any Device manufactured by
you commencing from the date of such termination, are not SimputersTM as defined andcertified by the Simputer Trust.
V.
General10.
You must accept this SGPL before reading or using the Specifications. You
are prohibited under law from using, modifying or distributing the Specifications
or from manufacturing or distributing any Devices based upon the Specifications orbased upon any modifications thereof. Therefore, by using, modifying or distributing
the Specifications or manufacturing or distributing any Device based on theSpecifications, you indicate by your actions, your acceptance of the terms of thisSGPL to do so as well as all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or
modifying the Specifications or manufacturing Devices based on the Specifications ormodifications of the Specifications.
11.
Each time you redistribute the Specifications, distribute any modificationsof the Specifications, or sell any Devices based on the Specifications, the recipientor purchaser, as the case may be, automatically receives a license from the Simputer
Trust to copy, distribute or modify the Specifications provided that such copying,
distribution or modification is carried out subject to the terms and conditions of
this SGPL. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients’ exerciseof the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance bythird parties to this SGPL. However you shall be liable for all direct or indirectconsequences arising from a failure on your part to distribute the Specifications
along with a copy of this SGPL and under the terms of the SGPL.

447

12.
If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement
or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you(whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of
this SGPL, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot
simultaneously satisfy your obligations under this SGPL and any other pertinent
obligations, then as a consequence you may not carry out any of the conflicting
obligations at all. For example, if you are subject to an obligation under a decreeof court that would prevent you from providing purchasers of any Device manufactured
by you with a copy of the Specifications, then the only way you could satisfy boththat obligation as well as the terms of this SGPL would be to refrain entirely fromselling the Device.
If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular
circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as awhole is intended to apply in other circumstances.
It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any patents or otherproperty right claims or to contest the validity of any such claims; this section has
the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the free distribution system proposed
under this SGPL, which is implemented by public license practices. Many people
have made generous contributions to the wide range of intellectual property that iscurrently being distributed through this system in reliance on consistent applicationof the system; it is up to the creator of such intellectual property to decide if heor she is willing to distribute the intellectual property through any other system
and a licensee cannot impose that choice.
13.
If the full scope of the applicability of this SGPL is restricted in certain
countries either by patents or by the operation of any other law, the Simputer Trustmay, at its discretion, add an explicit geographical limitation excluding thosecountries, so that distribution of the Specifications, modified Specifications orDevices manufactured using the Specifications or modified Specifications is permitted
only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this SGPL incorporates
the limitation as if written in the body of this SGPL.
14.
The Simputer Trust may publish revised and/or new versions of the SGPL fromtime to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version,
but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. Each version is givena distinguishing version number. Regardless of what version of the SGPL your copyof the Specifications was distributed under, you must ensure that you use the mostrecent version published by the Simputer Trust to govern your distribution or use of
the Specifications or modified Specifications or Devices.
V.
Disclaimer of Warranty:
15.
THE SPECIFICATIONS HAVE BEEN PROVIDED ”AS IS”. THE Simputer Trust DOESNOT PROVIDE ANY WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT
NOT LIMITED TO, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULARPURPOSE IN RESPECT OF THE SPECIFICATIONS OR ANY DEVICES THAT MAY BE MANUFACTUREDBASED ON THE SPECIFICATIONS OR THE MODIFIED SPECIFICATIONS. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THEQUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF DEVICES MANUFACTURED UNDER THE TERMS OF THE SPECIFICATIONSSHALL VEST WITH YOU. SHOULD THE SPECIFICATION PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU SHALL ASSUME THE
COST OF ALL NECESSARY REPAIR OR CORRECTION OF THE DEVICE.
16.
IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITINGWILL THE Simputer Trust OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE
THE SPECIFICATIONS AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDINGANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE
OR INABILITY TO USE THE SPECIFICATIONS IN ORDER TO DEVELOP OR MANUFACTURE DEVICES,EVEN IF THE Simputer Trust OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCHDAMAGES.
VI.
Acceptance:
17.
By clicking on the I Agree button below, you affirm that you agree to bebound by the terms of this SGPL and that you will abide by and adhere to the duties
and obligations contained in this Agreement. Your electronic acceptance shall operate
as a valid binding contract for the purpose of all applicable laws in this regard.

448

Academic Free License (2002)
Academic Free License
Version 1.2
This Academic Free License applies to any original work of authorship (the ”Original
Work”) whose owner (the ”Licensor”) has placed the following notice immediately
following the copyright notice for the Original Work:
Licensed under the Academic Free License version 1.2
Grant of License.
Licensor hereby grants to any person obtaining a copy of the Original Work (”You”)
a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license (1)to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, perform, distribute and/or sell copies of theOriginal Work and derivative works thereof, and (2) under patent claims owned orcontrolled by the Licensor that are embodied in the Original Work as furnished by
the Licensor, to make, use, sell and offer for sale the Original Work and derivative
works thereof, subject to the following conditions.
Attribution Rights.
You must retain, in the Source Code of any Derivative Works that You create, allcopyright, patent or trademark notices from the Source Code of the Original Work, aswell as any notices of licensing and any descriptive text identified therein as an”Attribution Notice.” You must cause the Source Code for any Derivative Works that
You create to carry a prominent Attribution Notice reasonably calculated to inform
recipients that You have modified the Original Work.
Exclusions from License Grant.
Neither the names of Licensor, nor the names of any contributors to the Original
Work, nor any of their trademarks or service marks, may be used to endorse or promote
products derived from this Original Work without express prior written permission of
the Licensor.
Warranty and Disclaimer of Warranty.
Licensor warrants that the copyright in and to the Original Work is owned by the
Licensor or that the Original Work is distributed by Licensor under a valid current
license from the copyright owner. Except as expressly stated in the immediately
proceeding sentence, the Original Work is provided under this License on an ”AS IS”
BASIS and WITHOUT WARRANTY, either express or implied, including, without limitation,
the warranties of NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULARPURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY OF THE ORIGINAL WORK IS WITH YOU. ThisDISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY constitutes an essential part of this License. No license to
Original Work is granted hereunder except under this disclaimer.
Limitation of Liability.
Under no circumstances and under no legal theory, whether in tort (including
negligence), contract, or otherwise, shall the Licensor be liable to any person forany direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages of any characterarising as a result of this License or the use of the Original Work including,
without limitation, damages for loss of goodwill, work stoppage, computer failure or
malfunction, or any and all other commercial damages or losses. This limitation of
liability shall not apply to liability for death or personal injury resulting from
Licensor’s negligence to the extent applicable law prohibits such limitation. Somejurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential
damages, so this exclusion and limitation may not apply to You.
License to Source Code.
The term ”Source Code” means the preferred form of the Original Work for making
modifications to it and all available documentation describing how to modify the
Original Work. Licensor hereby agrees to provide a machine-readable copy of the
Source Code of the Original Work along with each copy of the Original Work that
Licensor distributes. Licensor reserves the right to satisfy this obligation byplacing a machine-readable copy of the Source Code in an information repository
reasonably calculated to permit inexpensive and convenient access by You for as longas Licensor continues to distribute the Original Work, and by publishing the addressof that information repository in a notice immediately following the copyright noticethat applies to the Original Work.
Mutual Termination for Patent Action.
This License shall terminate automatically and You may no longer exercise any of the449

rights granted to You by this License if You file a lawsuit in any court alleging
that any OSI Certified open source software that is licensed under any license
containing this ”Mutual Termination for Patent Action” clause infringes any patentclaims that are essential to use that software.
Right to Use.
You may use the Original Work in all ways not otherwise restricted or conditioned bythis License or by law, and Licensor promises not to interfere with or be responsible
for such uses by You.
This license is Copyright (C) 2002 Lawrence E. Rosen. All rights reserved.
Permission is hereby granted to copy and distribute this license without
modification. This license may not be modified without the express written permissionof its copyright owner.

450

CopID notice (2002)
Voici un système complémentaire du copyright et du copyleft, qui a pour but destimuler l’échange libre et gratuit des idées et des savoirs : La mention CopID.
Il suffit d’indiquer ”CopID” sur l’oeuvre initiale, au bas d’un texte comme celui-ci
par exemple.
Si une oeuvre comporte une mention CopID initiale ou ultérieure, sa copie ou sa
modification sont totalement libres, sans mention du nom de l’auteur ni de la source.
Pour favoriser la circulation de l’oeuvre, il est recommandé mais pas obligatoire defaire figurer la mention CopID sur toute reproduction d’une oeuvre possédant déjà
une mention CopID. Un autre nom d’auteur peut même figurer sur la copie dans lamesure où le nom de l’auteur initial ou du copieur précédent est déclaré commesecondaire depuis son origine.
La mention CopID exprime la volonté d’un auteur de mettre son oeuvre dans le domaine
public non marchand. Elle autorise chacun à s’inspirer librement, à copier ou àrecopier totalement ou partiellement, ou à modifier une oeuvre et elle atteste lerefus de la part de l’auteur d’en faire ou d’en autoriser un usage lucratif.
Un auteur qui déclare l’une de ses oeuvres sous CopID renonce partiellement à
sa propriété intellectuelle personnelle sur celle-ci, mais n’autorise pas une
usurpation de cette propriété par une autre personne à des fins lucratives. Danscette éventualité, la propriété intellectuelle d’une oeuvre resterait protégée
légalement par la première divulgation de l’oeuvre faite par son auteur ou son
créateur.
CopID s’applique en premier lieu aux textes écrits sur internet, et dont l’auteur
souhaite une large diffusion par copies faites librement, donc sans référence ni à
une source ni à un auteur.
Application aux textes sur internet
Le texte initial proposé par un auteur comporte la mention CopID. Si le site
internet accepte cette mention lors de la publication du texte, il renonce à son
droit d’être cité en tant que source. Ce texte peut être recopié et modifié
librement sur tout autre site internet, y compris avec un nom d’auteur différent. Il
est alors simplement recommandé de faire figurer au bas de la copie la mention
CopID. La recopie de la mention CopID n’est pas une obligation, seule cette mention
lors de la première mise en ligne d’un texte détermine le statut définitif de ce
texte dans sa forme initiale.
(My name is nobody, think to my idea that’s all ! Texte publié sur ICI.ICI.free.fr
le 14 août 2002, mais vous pouvez effacer cette phrase)
Ce texte est CopID (copie et modifiaction 100% libre non marchande).

451

Mnémosyne Free Dissemination License (2002)
Mnemosyne free dissemination licence -- mfdl version 1
This document may be freely read, stored, reproduced, disseminated or quoted by anymeans on any medium provided the following conditions are met :1. every reader or user of this document acknowledges that he his aware thatno guarantee is given regarding its contents, on nay account, and specificallyconcerning veracity, accuracy and fitness for any purpose ;2. no modification is made other than change of representation format, correction of
obvious syntactic errors ;3. fragments must clearly refer to the original complete version, and to one copythat is easily accessed whenever possible ;4. this licence applies to the whole document (except for brief quotes),
independently of the representation format ;5. whatever the mode of storage, reproduction or dissemination, anyone able toaccess a digitized version of this document as the right to make a digitized copy ;the person must proceed with a format directly usable, and if possible editable,according to accepted, and publicly documented, public standards ;6. redistributing this document to a third party requires simultaneous redistributionof this licence, without modification, and in particular without further condition
or restriction, expressed or implied, related or not to this redistribution. inparticular, in case of an authorized inclusion in a database or collection, the owneror the manager of the database or the collection renounces any right related to thisinclusion and concerning the possible uses of the document after extraction from thedatabase or the collection, whether alone or in relation with other documents.
Any opposition or incompatibility of the above licence terms with legal orcontractual decisions or constraints are solved in favour of the legal or contractual
disposition.
Cette licence est une version modifiée par Michaël Thévenet de la Licence de Libre
Diffusion des Documents de Bernard Lang452

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