(via anthronaut) Cyberanthropologist Alexander Knorr has written a brilliant comment on "social sciences software licence madness". Provoked by an entry at ethno::log about a text analysis software for social scientists with an extremly restrictive licence, he wrote among others:
The minimum fee for using the software for academical purposes amounts to 192,- Euros. plonk* Usage duration is limited to a maximum of one year. :o Do I get this right?(...) The copyright holders of GABEK® aim at a certain academical group as potential customers. As GABEK® is to be used for "a thesis (e.g. master thesis etc)", and the project has to be "no larger in scope than a dissertation".
Well, till some years ago I was within that group, too, and I wrote a doctoral thesis. Interested in the results? Well, go and buy the book, 395 pages of glossy paper, containing a juicy story of anthropology, sex, drugs, magick, and rock'n'roll. For 19,- Euros, 13,- Euros if you are a student. If you have bought the book, it's your property, you can do with it whatever you want to. You can read it until you die, you can put it below your table-leg if that one happens to be exactly 2,1 cm too short, or you can make a bonfire of it. As you wish, it's your property then. No interest in spending nineteen Euros? Then, the fuck, download the whole piece of shit. The exact .pdf-file from which the printer made the book is online for free, CC-licenced. Welcome to the 21st century.
(...)
Information wants to be free, especially information and knowledge generated within academia. And academical knowledge that I am generating — if I ever really will, that is—for sure doesn't want to be the property of the maker of the tools I used to generate it. Adobe never asked me to send them one of my books for free, just because I used software they created to make a .pdf of my text.
Slap a CC-licence onto your product and write some sane terms of use for academics and I may, I may, have a look into the usability of your software for the noble discipline of sociocultural anthropology. Welcome to the Internet, to the blogosphere, and again to the 21st century.
>> read the whole post at Xirdalium
SEE ALSO:
The unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science
Tearing down those knowledge walls. Knowledge cannot be curtailed and has to be freely available
Virtual Ethnographer’s Toolkit: Invitation to a software fantasy
On Copyright and taboo and the future of anthropological publishing
This entry was posted by admin and filed under gift economy gift giving, Open Access Anthropology and Knowledge Sharing, University / Academia.
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