Wednesday 22 June 2016

Why share / why collaborate? - Some useful sources outside Debian.

"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris."
[Larry Wall, Programming Perl, O'Reilly Assoc. (and expanded at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris) ]

Because "A mind is a terrible thing to waste"
 [The above copyright Young and Rubicam, advertisers, for UNC Fund, 1960s]

"Why I Must Write GNU

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 in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. ... "
[rms, GNU Manifesto copyright 1985-2014 Free Software Foundation Inc. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html]

"La pédagogie, l’information, la culture et le débat d’opinion sont le seul fait des utilisateurs, des webmestres indépendants et des initiatives universitaires et associatives."
 Education, information, culture and debate can only come from users, independent webmasters, academic or associative organizations.
[le minirézo http://www.uzine.net/article60.html]

We value:
  1. Contributors and facilitators over ‘editors’ and ‘authors’
  2. Collaboration over indiviualised production
  3. Here and now production over sometime soon production
  4. Meaningful credit for all contributors over single author attribution
 https://github.com/greyscalepress/manifestos - from whom much of the above quotations were abstracted - Manifestos for the Internet Age
Grayscale Press ISBN-13:978-2-940561-02-5]

[Note] Github repository is marked with licence of CC-Zero but explicitly states that licences of the individual pieces of writing should be respected

So - collaboration matters. Not repeating needless make-work that someone else has already done matters. Giving due credit: sharing: doing and "do-ocracy" matters above all

Perversely, Acknowledging prior work and prior copyright correctly is the beginning and end of the law. Only by doing this conscientiously and sharing in giving due credit can any of us truly participate.

It seems clear to me at least that contributing openly and freely, allowing others to make use of your expertise, opinions, prior experience can anyone progress in good conscience.

Accordingly, I recommend to my work colleagues and those I advise that they only consider FLOSS licences, that they do not make use of code snippets or random, unlicensed code culled form Github and that they contribute








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