Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0

 This is crossposted from the Students for Free Culture blog: http://freeculture.org/blog/2012/08/27/stop-the-inclusion-of-proprietary-licenses-in-creative-commons-4-0/

Over the past several years, Creative Commons has increasingly recommended free culture licenses over non-free ones. Now that the drafting process for version 4.0 of their license set is in full gear, this is a “a once-in-a-decade-or-more opportunity” to deprecate the proprietary NonCommercial and NoDerivatives clauses. This is the best chance we have to dramatically shift the direction of Creative Commons to be fully aligned with the definition of free cultural works by preventing the inheritance of these proprietary clauses in CC 4.0's final release.

The concept of free culture has its roots in the history of free software (popularly marketed as "open source software"), and it’s an important philosophical underpinning to the CC license set. As with free software, the word "free" in free culture means free as in freedom, not as in price, but Creative Commons has not set or adhered to any standard or promise of rights or taken any ethical position in their support of a free culture. The definition of free cultural works describes the necessary freedoms to ensure that media monopolies cannot form to restrict the creative and expressive freedoms of others and outlines which restrictions are permissible or not. Although Creative Commons provides non-free licenses, the fact that they recognize the definition reveals a willingness and even desire to change.

Creative Commons started off by focusing much more on flexibility for rightsholders, but since its early days, the organization has moved away from that position. Several projects and licenses have been retired such as the Sampling, Founders' Copyright, and Developing Nations License. It's obvious that something like Founders' Copyright which keeps "all rights reserved" for 14 years (before releasing into the public domain) is not promoting free culture. Giving rightsholders more options and easier ways to choose what rights they want to give others actually reinforces permission culture, creates a fragmented commons, and takes away freedom from all cultural participants.

What's wrong with NC and ND?

The two proprietary clauses remaining in the CC license set are NonCommercial (NC) and NoDerivatives (ND), and it is time Creative Commons stopped supporting them, too. Neither of them provide better protection against misappropriation than free culture licenses. The ND clause survives on the idea that rightsholders would not otherwise be able protect their reputation or preserve the integrity of their work, but all these fears about allowing derivatives are either permitted by fair use anyway or already protected by free licenses. The NC clause is vague and survives entirely on two even more misinformed ideas. First is rightsholders' fear of giving up their copy monopolies on commercial use, but what would be considered commercial use is necessarily ambiguous. Is distributing the file on a website which profits from ads a commercial use? Where is the line drawn between commercial and non-commercial use? In the end, it really isn't. It does not increase the potential profit from work and it does not provide any better protection than than Copyleft does (using the ShareAlike clause on its own, which is a free culture license).

The second idea is the misconception that NC is anti-property or anti-privatization. This comes from the name NonCommercial which implies a Good Thing (non-profit), but it's function is counter-intuitive and completely antithetical to free culture (it retains a commercial monopoly on the work). That is what it comes down to. The NC clause is actually the closest to traditional "all rights reserved" copyright because it treats creative and intellectual expressions as private property. Maintaining commercial monopolies on cultural works only enables middlemen to continue enforcing outdated business models and the restrictions they depend on. We can only evolve beyond that if we abandon commercial monopolies, eliminating the possibility of middlemen amassing control over vast pools of our culture.

Most importantly, though, is that both clauses do not actually contribute to a shared commons. They oppose it. The fact that the ND clause prevents cultural participants from building upon works should be a clear reason to eliminate it from the Creative Commons license set. The ND clause is already the least popular, and discouraging remixing is obviously contrary to a free culture. The NonCommercial clause, on the other hand, is even more problematic because it is not so obvious in its proprietary nature. While it has always been a popular clause, it's use has been in slow and steady decline.

Practically, the NC clause only functions to cause problems for collaborative and remixed projects. It prevents them from being able to fund themselves and locks them into a proprietary license forever. For example, if Wikipedia were under a NC license, it would be impossible to sell printed or CD copies of Wikipedia and reach communities without internet access because every single editor of Wikipedia would need to give permission for their work to be sold. The project would need to survive off of donations (which Wikipedia has proven possible), but this is much more difficult and completely unreasonable for almost all projects, especially for physical copies. Retaining support for NC and ND in CC 4.0 would give them much more weight, making it extremely difficult to retire them later, and continue to feed the fears that nurture a permission culture.

Why does this need to happen now?

People have been vocal about this issue for a long time, and awareness of the problematic nature of ND and NC has been spreading, especially in the areas of Open Educational Resources (such as OpenCourseWare) and Open Access to research. With the percentage of CC-licensed works that permit remixing and commercial use having doubled since Creative Commons' first year, it's clear that there is a growing recognition that the non-free license clauses are not actually necessary, or even good.

Both NC and ND are incompatible with free licenses and many, if not the vast majority, of NC and ND licensed works will not be relicensed after CC 4.0, so the longer it takes to phase out those clauses, the more works will be locked into a proprietary license. There will never be a better time than this. Creative Commons has been shifting away from non-free licenses for several years, but if it does not abandon them entirely it will fail as a commons and divide our culture into disconnected parts, each with its own distinct licence, rights and permissions granted by the copyright holders who 'own' the works.

In December of 2006, Creative Commons implemented a subtle difference between the pages for free culture and non-free licenses: green and yellow background graphics (compare Attribution-ShareAlike to Attribution-NonCommercial). This was also when they began using license buttons that include license property icons, so that there would be an immediate visual cue as to the specific license being used before clicking through to the deed. In February of 2008, they began using a seal on free culture licenses that said "Approved for Free Cultural Works", which was another great step in the right direction. In July of this year, Creative Commons released a completely redesigned license chooser that explicitly says whether the configuration being used is free culture or not. This growing acknowledgement of free vs. non-free licenses was a crucial development, since being under a Creative Commons license is so often equated with being a free cultural work. Now, retiring the NC and ND clauses is a critical step in Creative Commons' progress towards taking a pro-freedom approach.

The NC and ND clauses not only depend on, but also feed misguided notions about their purpose and function. With that knowledge, it would be a mistake not to retire them. Creative Commons should not depend on and nurture rightsholders' fears of misappropriation to entice them into choosing non-free CC licenses. Instead of wasting effort maintaining and explaining a wider set of conflicting licenses, Creative Commons as an organization should focus on providing better and more consistent support for the licenses that really make sense. We are in the perfect position to finally create a unified and undivided commons. Creative Commons is at a crossroads.This decisive moment will in all likelihood bind their direction either being stuck serving the fears that validate permission culture or creating a shared commons between all cultural participants.

We don't want the next generation of the free culture movement to be saddled with the dichotomies of the past; we want our efforts to be spent fighting the next battles.

What should we do?

There have been lots of discussions on the CC-license list about promoting free culture licenses and discouraging proprietary ones. A couple of proposals have been made to encourage the use of free licenses over the non-free ones.

One is a rebranding of the non-free licenses. They could be differentiated in a much more significant way than it currently is, such as referring to NC and ND as the "Restricted Commons" or "Limited Commons" or some variant thereof. License buttons could also be color coded in the same way that license pages are (green for free culture licenses, yellow for proprietary ones). Another proposal is to rename NonCommercial to something more honest such as CommercialMonopoly.

While these proposals and other ideas are certainly worth supporting, we should not lose sight on our ultimate goal: for Creative Commons to stop supporting non-free licenses. We should not feel like this is impossible to achieve at this point, as it will be much more difficult to do later. More people than ever are starting to advocate against proprietary CC licenses, and there is clear evidence and reasoning behind these arguments. We have the power to prevent the inclusion of non-free clauses in this upcoming version of the Creative Commons License set.

To join us in resisting the inclusion of proprietary clauses in CC 4.0, there are a few important things you can do:

• Send a letter to the Creative Commons Board of Directors about your concerns.
• Publish your letter or a blog post on the issue (and send it to the list below)
• Join the Creative Commons licenses development list to participate in discussions of the 4.0 draft: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-licenses
• Contribute to the CC 4.0 wiki pages: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0

Last chance to fund Tube, an upcoming Blender-animated film

Blender's Open Movie Projects have already proved that it's possible to produce stunningly high-quality 3D animated films exclusively using free software in a studio setting. Now, a new animated short film called Tube, inspired by the ancient epic poem of Gilgamesh, is expanding on that work to bring free culture to the masses. The Tube project is not merely evidence of the technical capabilities of free software tools like Blender, PiTiVi, and Fedora GNU/Linux, but living proof of their viability for independent filmmakers. The most impressive aspect of the project is that it has managed to come together through distributed collaboration between 56 artists from 22 countries — some of which are at war. Tube truly highlights the incredible unifying power of free software tools and a free culture model. 

Within the first few days, Tube's Kickstarter campaign reached the minimal baseline goal of $22K and subsequently hit Slashdot. As the film enters the final stages of production, the Tube team needs as much support as they can get to make this story a huge success for free software, free culture, and independent animators everywhere. With the production funding target of $50K in sight and just a couple days left in the campaign, this is your last chance to support this ambitious undertaking and get your name in the film as a backer. There is enormous potential here; as Mashable questions, 'Will This Open-Source Animated Film Change the Movie Industry Forever?'

The film's public release is scheduled for 7 months from now along with all the assets, source, and project files under the free culture and copyleft Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) licence. For an in-depth discussion with the team, check out this interview with the Tube project founders on Libre Graphics World. It's up to us now to help Tube affirm the legitimacy of producing free cultural works in a fully free software workflow. 

Join the FSF Now for a New Membership Benefit: Credit Union Eligibility!

During my 2010 summer internship at the Free Software Foundation I was able to bring lots of new ideas to the table, get involved with campaigns and publicity, and take on leadership roles like organizing the Massachusetts LibrePlanet Team.

One project of mine was to find a Credit Union for the FSF to partner with in order to bring eligibility to their membership base. Why? Banks have too much power. They've destroyed economies. Credit unions are basically banks (they offer all the same services and often more), but they are structured democratically and don't have to potential to do the kind of damage big banks do. Credit unions are not-for-profit, member-owned cooperatives rather than profit-driven corporations. Members elect a volunteer (unpaid) board of directors, and profits don't go to shareholders but instead go into lower rates on loans, higher rates on savings, and better services. If you're still letting big banks hold your money, see what credit unions you're eligible to join!

Finally, over one year after my internship, I've finally finished my project. If you are a card-carrying member of the FSF, you are now eligible to join Digital Federal Credit Union. Some neat benefits include being able to deposit checks online, and DCU is one of the very few credit unions that has that allow you to cash checks via your Android or iPhone using an app (disclaimer: zero-cost proprietary software). For more information check out the announcement and join DCU today!

Chaos: Some clarifications on Novacut

My post on the Novacut project stirred up quite a shitstorm, pardon my language. I can't even attempt to explain the whole point of my post—something that seemed to be misunderstood by anyone who didn't already agree—better than Jeff "Nekohayo" Fortin has in his blog post, which I have included below:

Chaos

No matter how I try to write this, it will come out wrong. I have basically no chances of improving anything at all, especially since I’m no Shakespeare. I’m good at singing the praise of contributors, but I’m terrible at handling delicate situations. I’ll still try clarifying my thoughts into this post, which I’m quite certain will be perceived as an attack, propaganda or be subjected to attack. That’s fine. All those things are normal and to be expected after what I’ve done. By linking to Danny’s post I officially endorsed it as an individual. Since I’m a volunteer contributor to pitivi, the result was akin to a napalm strike to clear a beach for surfing.

I underestimated the consequences and hurt Jason so badly he was trembling with anger. It is only when I chatted with him once more on IRC tonight that I came to realize how deep the wound was. Even though I have my doubts they can pull it off, deep inside I’m rooting for them to succeed.

I am not here to ask forgiveness as it sounds impossible, but I am however very sorry for any pain caused by my actions. Not sure how to phrase this properly, basically I don’t think forgiveness is something you can request.

Somehow this reminds me of Ran, although I should be careful in personifying anyone as Saburo or Hidetora in this (I’m probably both, anyway). After that chat, now that I’ve been banished from the kingdom and I’m nothing more than a beggar, perhaps I can tell you the story that made me break the bundle of arrows.

The end goal was not to attack the person or the core idea behind a distributed video editor focused on making videographers more efficient at what they do, but a last attempt at preventing another tragedy.



Let me tell you (the public) the story of one of those failed video editors projects. In November 2008 I received an email from the guy who was launching his video editor project, Saya. Just as I did with Jason, I wrote lengthy emails and had endless conversations trying to make him see the hardship he was to face. Since pitivi was dormant at the time, I was cautious in my predictions that he would crash and burn, and accepted to be part of his project as an advisor. In the process I have accumulated tons of inside knowledge, and what you can see on the surface is only the tip of the iceberg. The ambitious goals, the mislead technical decisions and autocratic management attitude of the leader paled in comparison to his delusions of grandeur.

Then, just as I had predicted, this guy went into nervous breakdown (his own words) as well as complete financial disarray after alienating every contributor around him. He now came back as an empty shell of a man wandering the remainders of the castle that was burned to the ground. When he came back in that state, I asked if he would swallow his pride (much like Danny wrote here) and join an existing project—any project—which he refused. On his blog, you can see some saddeningly meaningless posts about writing playback GUI controls or an “image reading plugin”.

After so many years and seeing such a spectacular failure still occuring, I thought that next time, I would try as hard as possible to prevent it from reoccuring, by insisting much more on the forewarning part and avoiding to ever have to say “I told you so” again. I prefer to be banished first for having done my public duty rather than after the unfolding of yet another tragedy.

Wait, I know this, you know this, and Jason obviously knows this because I’ve been warning him incessantly for a year, until a point where he said “We’ll have to agree to disagree”. That doesn’t answer the question that burns on your mind, “Why did you break the bundle of arrows?” Why suddenly rock the boat on which we’re all standing?

I’m generally immune to marketing in the media in the “real world”, but not as much in open source. I had this belief that it was a completely separate world, a belief that was shattered by events of the past few months.

Seeing the first few videos posted for the 2nd kickstarter, I was annoyed. Then,seeing the latest artist video posted, my jaw dropped on the floor. What I felt at this moment is beyond words and can only be understood by someone who has been observing the tireless, daily struggle of all the open source video editors for over six years. Particularly with a claim like this going unedited: “This thing exists! It’s called Novacut”.

I immediately posted a comment on YouTube, in which I did not mince my words. You can now have a better idea why I found it logical to link to Danny’s post afterwards. I linked to it with the shortest post summary I could think of, because:

• I could not condone his post: I was agreeing with what he presented.
• I could not add arguments in the same direction, since
• I could not think of a better way to say what he said, although his point about “this is a trend to be stopped” was certainly misunderstood as a personal attack.
• You can guess from the tone of my YouTube comment, I was not in a good disposition at that time.
• I am not the best writer there is (it took me over 9 hours just to write the post you’re reading right now).

And all hell broke lose.

Did breaking the bundle of arrows do any good? Does trying to prove the point in public achieve anything but suffering?

I need to say that I ideologically still stand behind my endorsement of that blog post and the comments I have posted. Sometimes, even when you know that saying such things out loud can’t possibly be seen in a good light, you still have to say it, for the sake of exposing to the public at large the situation as you have analyzed it to be. Open source is also a matter of dealing in public as much as possible. Leave your dissent buried in your IRC channel and private discussions, and you do not achieve anything for you, for the person you disagree with, for the world.

As improbable as it may seem, to me this is not about money. 25 000$ is peanuts. I’m not saying this because I’m a rich businessman or rockstar developer—I’m a student who spends most if not all his free time contributing to open source. I don’t make a dime on it and I’ve never been into this for the money. If it was about money I would have bought myself a copy of Sony Vegas years ago and called it a day, because I’ve spent so many years working on getting pitivi back on track that I am at a net loss in terms of unpaid work. I even wrote the user manual in secret while I was working in a summer job, and this year I had to take time away from supervising 23 employees while I spent all the rest of my free awake time mentoring SoC students for pitivi (and I still think the amount of mentoring I could provide was insufficient). My weekly paycheck was smaller because I spent less time working “in the real world”. Hang on, where was I heading towards when I started this paragraph?

Ah right: Jason, I don’t mind you getting 25 grand. That’s not the point.

I spoke the truth when I said that I knew you guys would reach the goal a few days ago, it was not even a question in my mind. Deep down, I knew that for sure as soon as you passed your previous milestone of 11K$.

I am still a bit dumbfounded that, in the comments on that blog post, there were accusations of actively “threatening the financial security of [Jason's] family”. I hope I can make that clear. It has never been something as outlandish as trying to bankrupt your family.

I’ve juggled with the ideas for years and I still haven’t found a definitive answer to what could be achieved if we threw money at pitivi. It’s not like I’m seeing a financial loss here, it has been going on for years without any budget. I rather wished you’d have got 250 000$ instead of 25 000$. I am unable to imagine, as others pointed out, what you can do in the long run with a mere 25K without quickly implementing a more permanent business model that regularly brings in significant amounts of money. I sincerely hope you get your financial situation sorted out.

Yes, of course I had that moment of “What is this? How unfair is this to all the other video editor projects out there? Imagine fulltime paid developers on kdenlive, I’d finally be able to ditch pitivi!”. That comes back to my section above: I felt compelled to share that link because not doing so would have been “refraining from giving any credibility to naysayers” and passively nodding in front of misleading statements such as “it exists”.

Jason basically went about it in a completely opposite direction to all open source software development models, with insane risks involved. After seeing what happened of Diaspora, one can’t help but to be worried. I think that was the main point behind Danny’s article, where he said enough about these macro-socio-economic issues, in much better words that I could try to convey myself. Frankly, the more I write on this subject, the more I’ll drift on a tangent and look like I’m bent on dismissing your project. Let’s shift my point of view for a minute.

What would I think of Novacut, if I was not a cautious cynical old fart?

I’d have drank the cool-aid. Back in 2005-2007, I would have killed for the realization of such a promise as Novacut’s. I would have thrown hundreds of bucks into the kickstarter. 25K, in the grand scheme of things, is breadcrumbs. I would have been their most vehement fan. I would even have called the CBC and written articles for the local newspapers or tech magazines.

Yesterday, seeing as they were merely a few hundred dollars away from the goal, I even pledged a couple of bucks myself (before I had the chat and realized how much I hurt Jason).

What will happen in the future?

If Novacut succeeds, PiTiVi dies. Hang on a minute. This statement is not to be interpreted as a threat or warning. This is me publicly saying that if Novacut manages to rapidly reach feature parity with pitivi, then pitivi becomes technologically irrelevant and *I* will join the Novacut project (if they ever let me in). These are my thoughts and do not necessarily reflect those of others, though I know that many probably feel the same as I do on this one.

And without me, I can pretty much assure you that pitivi will slow back to a crawl and fade out from my cladogram and my life. And thus will Novacut be the new heir. The king is dead, long live the King. Such transmutations are a curious fact of the cycle of life in open source.

In short, there are two possible outcomes that I can see in the long term:

• Novacut succeeds and produces the FOSS editor that people have been awaiting for so long (simple in the beginning, but usable with more coming over time). In that case, join Novacut since it is the way forward.
• Novacut manages to produce some code that others will use and useful lessons are provided for others (eg design decisions, workflows, etc.)

Either way there will at least be some benefit.

Everybody in life secretly wants to start a revolution and write history. In the grand scheme of things, I am a speck of dust, I’m happy to just go back to the stage of my life where I was only a cineast who wanted a “friggin editor that works”. Tell you what, you build it as awesome as you promised in the next decade, and if you don’t want me I’ll “go find a new hobby” as you suggested. Software is a big part of my life right now, but in the end I’ll be a pack of bones in a grave and until then, maybe I should go fly a kite — literally.



My feelings towards Jason could be summarized by this quote from Randy Pausch:

“When you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you.”

And this is why I feel this way…

…history…

Novacut: Not just vaporware.

I am not here to be a cynic and say that Novacut's funding efforts will fail (again). I am writing to say that the only way for the ideas behind Novacut to be realized is to stop pretending that throwing $25K worth of funding at it could possibly save the project. Over the past year, Novacut has put almost all effort into soliciting money. In the amount of time it would've taken to implement these features in existing software, Novacut has mainly been producing advertisements for itself.

What Novacut is doing is harmful to free software, especially existing video editors. While the broader goals of the Novacut project, like decentralized collaboration, are admirable and deserve support, the project's current course will only serve to further splinter an area of free software that has already suffered enough from people thinking they can make something better from scratch.

Graph illustrating the current state of free software video editors. 

I don't like writing about this, especially knowing how much an individual has poured into this effort, but it needs to be said. I don't think that Novacut should disappear, but its current path needs serious reevaluation.

Kickstarter is a very cool platform for funding all sorts of great projects. The problem is that sometimes, maybe even often, successful funding depends on making high quality videos to advertise the project, rather than the actual ability to complete the project. Even if we let that slide, is Novacut a worthwhile project? When all existing free software projects for some purpose (like video editing) are fundamentally flawed in some way, unable to incoporate a major innovation, or simply has an unwelcoming community, then starting a new project or forking an existing one may be necessary. This is not one of those times.

Jason Gerard DeRose, the one-man show behind Novacut, wants to reinvent the wheel and the axel, build a self-powered vehicle on them, open up a mobile ice cream shop, and have you fund it for him. Don't get me wrong, Jason has some cool ideas, but the project as it exists (or is envisioned to exist) today, is doomed to failure. A list of things you wish your video editor would do is not deserving of $25K worth of funding. Novacut displays an impressive combination of setting ridiculous goals, being unwilling to collaborate with existing projects, and deceptively marketing toward artists that are not intimately familiar with the ecosystem of free software video editing.

If Novacut gets the funding Jason is asking for, the money wasted isn't even the biggest issue. Novacut is distracting from worthwhile projects and promoting a development model that doesn't work, building a bad reputation for projects that really do deserve support.

Novacut is all talk and marketing and no code. All there is to show are some simple HTML5+JavaScript video demos: a video player/scrubber does not make a desktop video editor. Spending so much time on identity and branding, and having no code beyond the tiny demos to show for it, is becoming a trend that needs to be stopped.

What even is the Novacut project? Let's try not to feel too uncomfortable while we go through their awkward buzzword-inflated infomercial-style videos.

In their first Kickstarter video, they talk about a few ideas. Jason describes his vision to create video project "source code" to let you see all the files and editing done to produce a final cut. This is commonly known as the combination of the input media files and the project or save files from the video editing tools used. Nothing magical about it. You can't create a video editor without "video source code". Every video editor has this. It's simply up to the people doing the work whether they actually share their source files. Jason describes it as if this "source code" would also be contained in the actual video file you watch, but personally, I don't want to download 50GB of source files just to watch an episode of a show.

Next, he talks about a distributed workflow. This seems to be the only "unique" idea behind Novacut, and it's a good one, but we'll get into that later. This will be powered by a piece of software Novacut is writing called dmedia, the Distributed Media Library. The demo of Novacut's reimagining of the classic video timeline, equivalent to Final Cut's storyboard mode, is rather elegant, but there is not even a mockup to illustrate how collaborative editing will look, or even any aspect of editing other than this "slice and sequence" prototype.

He closes with a brief remark mentioning a "better business model" for artists, without describing what that entails. Next, Tara Oldfield appears to discuss creating a community of "teachers and learners" again, without giving out any details, but that would require some sort of web distribution platform. Oh yes! In this interview with OMG! Ubuntu!, Jason describes the plan for monetizing Novacut:

"After the initial editor development, we'll be building an online marketplace though which artists can distribute their work to their fans, and through which fans can support the artists they love. 

Our business model is for artists to make money, and when they do, we take a cut to cover the costs of the infrastructure we provide. As we won't require exclusivity and artists will retain ownership of their work, artists will always be free to seek other venues. This puts good pressure on us to truly take care of artists, to constantly earn their business. The marketplace will allow us to fund the video editor's long-term development."

So Novacut will be tied to this online marketplace? This is turning into a rather large project. Still, the idea of an online marketplace to fund the development of a free software video editor isn't a bad idea, and it is especially nice that all videos will be required to use a copyleft license approved for free cultural works. But what about that distributed workflow? In the video for their current Kickstarter campagn, 100 tickets for their "Novacut cloud" are advertised for anyone who gives them $300 or more. So wait, even the video editing will be tied to a web service? I'm willing to bet hosting all those source files won't be cheap.

So, the Novacut project aims to build an unilateral, top to bottom, storyboarding, script writing, video editing, and distribution platform consisting of three major components: the collaboration-enabled editor itself, the community platform for distributed production, and the distribution venue. Let's ignore the last two, since the video editor itself needs to exist before those can even begin.

What has the Novacut video editor promised us? Video source code and distributed/decentralized workflows. Again, this is something every video with a "save" button already has. Novacut's solution to this seems to be storing or at least tracking all resources remotely, allowing multiple people to make changes, and then resynchronizing the changes. Not only is that not actually real-time collaboration, but this sounds like a whole mess of added complexity to both the user interface and the video "source code". Somehow, after writing yet another video editor from scratch, they will also be able to build complicated functionality to support their cloud service, a service that is not truly decentralized as you will have to host it yourself, or likely pay someone to host it for you. Jason has admitted that he has no idea how the user interface will look to support this. There are no mockups or even informal descriptions of how it could look, only a mishmash of feature ideas he wants Novacut to have and how he wants it to be perfect.

Even if they get funded, where would the money go? What can you do for 25K a year? You can barely feed one person in the USA. Developers are typically paid $90K per year. So, you manage to feed 1 person for a year, and then what, another fundraiser every few months? This is precisely why the trend of putting all efforts into Kickstarter funding needs to end. It's sad how desperate they've become, and no free software contributor should go through this:

"We've thrown ourselves into Novacut completely, and in the process have maxed out all our credit cards, burned through every drop of savings, and borrowed basically all the money we can." 

"We're desperate. We were about a week from having to pull the plug on Novacut when FCPX was released, so we thought we'd try one last ditch effort. The sacrifices we've made to work full time on Novacut the last year... have left our lives in shambles."

In public discussions on IRC channels, Jason has repeatedly refused to build upon existing video editors for a series of wishy-washy reasons along the lines of 'I don't want to be hampered in design', when he doesn't even have concrete design plans, nevermind actual mockups, and he never even attempted to work with other projects, dismissing them as projects that would not be interested in such revolutionary changes. Yet, for one thing, PiTiVi already shares the same goals as Novacut (collaborative editing has been an idea they've been interested in for a while), and a few years ago someone already started a patch that enabled realtime collaboration. There are also plans to create a storyboard mode like in the demo. Jason has failed to provide one good reason for needing to create a separate project.

In all of Novacut's videos, the project is described as if it is the first free software video editor ever, and as if it already exists. In the most recent video, they again utter all the abstract things Novacut hopes to be, and they actually say, "This thing exists". It doesn't. In a beautiful fusion of hipness and cheesy advertising speak, this entertaining infomercial goes over all of the ideas Novacut has, as if throwing money at it will suddently make them come true: automatically syncing audio, switching clips between speakers, regular backups, checking file integrity, distributed libraries of tagged media, etc. Yet, in their own words, Novacut should be adding these on to existing projects! Pros and cons? Pros: "It's open source, so any functionality that doesn't exist right now can easily be implemented in the future by the fact that any programmer can come along and...and add that functionality." Cons: "It doesn't exist yet".

Brilliant.

So, what should Novacut do?

Simple: narrow their focus.

For the video editor, Jason needs to just swallow his pride and join forces with PiTiVi, as he has been invited to again and again. It uses the same powerful backends that Novacut planned to use, but real-time collaborative editing is something that could could actually be implemented soon. PiTiVi has just implemented audio sync and multi-camera alignment, and surely the rest of Jason's revolutionary ideas can be implemented as well. Novacut's main purpose could shift from creating a new video editor, straight to building the web platform for sharing source files and distributing final projects to their audiences.

Novacut has been gaining momentum, and that should not go to waste. There are some good ideas that really deserve fruition, but unless Jason can get over the need to build his own fantastical media sharing and editing megaplatform, he won't be contributing to the advancement of free software video editing. 

Delete Your Facebook for Your Birthday

As the need for free (as in freedom) tools to communicate and socialize becomes increasingly urgent, more projects have been popping up to take up the challenge: GNU social and StatusNet, Crabgrass, Apache Wave, and more. The list goes on, and on. If you're not yet familiar with the issue, or even if you are, you should watch this excellent talk by Eben Moglen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gORNmfpD0ak

The first step towards digital autonomy is of course to stop using services that restrict your freedom, whether they do so through unfair terms of service, disregard for your privacy, locking you in, and/or any other means. Facebook is the biggest and baddest right now, so it's a great place to start. If you're like most Facebook users, you're probably thinking something along the lines of "This is great, but I could never afford to delete my Facebook account". Really though, it isn't that bad. Instead of just having one central web service you rely on, you'll just be spread out on what you're already using (phone, text, IM, email), and perhaps picking up some new tools. It is a small sacrifice, but sometimes, what's slightly more convenient to you as an individual, is extremely harmful to society on a large scale. 

So, if you're willing to do it, there's really no better time to delete your Facebook account than on your birthday. All your friends will be coming to your page to post a quick "happy birthday" note on your wall, only to find that they can't, and that you'll be leaving. It's a great way to maximize your impact, and make sure everyone has other ways to contact you. 

It's easy: 

Step 1:  A while in advance (a week or more before your birthday) - Create a Facebook event for your birthday alerting people of your decision and why. Go ahead and copy the text I used for my event: 

For my birthday, I am permanently deleting (not decativating, so I won't be able to restore) my Facebook account. The day after this event, I will export all of my data and my account will be gone! 

If you want to keep in touch, here's how you can: 

Email: [your email here]

Phone/text: [your number here]

IM (Jabber/Google Talk): [your Jabber ID here]

[other]: [your other contact here]

Why I am leaving: 

• Facebook is bad for the world - 
  They've plainly declared war on privacy, they lock users in, and they're trying to take over every aspect of our online lives (and dumb it down).
  http://gizmodo.com/5530178​/top-ten-reasons-you-shoul​d-quit-facebook
• Facebook is homogeneous and unilateral - 
  What we use to communicate shapes us. As more and more stuff goes on Facebook, the more everything we do online has to conform to Facebook's platform. It's not adding to our online presence; it's sucking it up. 
• Facebook is annoying - 
  The groups, the apps, the "likes", the marketing and advertising, the constant stream of immutable noise.

Will i ever come back?

My requirements for an acceptable social networking tool are simple. It must be free software (also known as "open source"), and should be federated (think about email: you don't need a Gmail account to send mail to a Gmail account, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail users can email each other, etc). Since Facebook will likely never meet those simple requirements, I will likely never come back. 

If you want to leave too:

Read about how to delete your account, get the word out, and export your information here:
http://blog.thesilentnumber.me/2011/07/delete-your-facebook-for-your-birthday.html

Invite all your friends to the event by using this Chromium/Google Chrome extension which adds a "select all" option to the invite window of Facebook events:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/npnaoebelpbmmcdoboinnphhoakdnaah

Then, if you want to increase your chances of people actually reading the event, click the "Message Guests" button and either paste in the same text, or write your own. 

Step 2: Shortly (a few days) before your birthday - Go to your Facebook privacy settings, select custom, and click the "Customize settings" link. On that page, under the "Things others share" section, uncheck the "Friends can post on my Wall" option. Then, go to your event page, hit the "Share" link to post it on your wall, and add a message like "For my birthday, I am leaving Facebook permanently". 

Step 3: On the day or the day after your birthday - Backup all of your account data then delete! Some tools for this are: 

• https://chrome.google.com/​webstore/detail/ficlccidpk​aiepnnboobcmafnnfoomga Chromium and Google Chrome extension that will copy all of your friends contact info and allow you to import them into Gmail.
• https://www.facebook.com/d​ownload/ Go to "Download Your Information" towards the bottom of your Facebook account settings. 
• http://facebookexport.com/ Get even more info. 
• http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/how-to-mass-export-all-of-your-facebook-friends-private-email-addresses/ Create a temporary Yahoo mail account that will allow you to import Facebook contacts. 

Then delete your account! The "Deactivate Account" option doesn't delete your account and Facebook will keep your data. To delete, use this link: http://www.facebook.com/he​lp/contact.php?show_form=d​elete_account

Now, you can bask in the freedom. 

The Free Game Lag

My article in the Free Software Foundation's Fall 2010 Bulletin, The Free Game Lag, was just posted online. In it, I explain why proponents of software freedom should not and need not dismiss gaming as a hopeless effort for free software. The version here includes a section on Blender's free game effort, which was not included in the FSF Bulletin due to space constraints, but you can read that version here. Printed copies of the Bulletin are sent out to FSF members twice a year. If you would like to support free software and the work of the FSF, you can learn more about membership and benefits here: http://www.fsf.org/associate/

There is one category of software that many see as being unsustainable as free software. Free video games have lagged behind other areas of free software, and the reasons behind this are fairly simple. 

Nexuiz

Still, even many free software proponents may fail to provide an answer to those who are skeptical about the viability of free gaming. While it is true that software should be ethical, video games need not suffer for it. The business models for production simply need to change, and just like they have for other software, they will for gaming as well. When people ask you how gaming as we know it can exist in a free software world, you should open with your response with, “It can't, but it can be better.”

There is a natural tendency for free software to take on more essential aspects of computing first. While subjective, it is clear that gaming is not a top-priority and, as such, has not advanced as rapidly as say, web browsers or word processors. That isn't to say that no progress has been made. Indeed, free gaming has certainly been catching up, but it will take a while to surpass the quality of proprietary games. This should not be surprising or alarming. We will get there in good time.

Ryzom

It's always funny to face the same arguments that have been presented to the free software movement and completely disproven in practice (e.g. Why would anybody produce free software?). The possible incentives for creating free games are as numerous as the motivations for producing other free software. Perhaps a graphics hardware company wants to fund the development of a game to show of the capabilities of their hardware. Perhaps a hospital wants to fund an enjoyable way for surgeons to improve their dexterity. Perhaps a school wants to fund a suite of educational games for students. Perhaps a competitive gaming league wants to fund their own game for tournaments. There are already a few notable examples of free games that are proving business models can be built around free games. 

Through a partnership with the Free Software Foundation, Winch Gate Properties Ltd released Ryzom, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, as free software under the AGPL, and its artwork as free cultural works under the CC-BY-SA license. As an online game, they fund development through subscriptions, so releasing as free software can only help them. 

Yo Fankie! 

Blender, the free software 3D media creation suite, organizes the production of films which are released as free cultural works and also organized the development of a free game based off of one of their films. These efforts help foster the development of Blender and showcase its abilities. They are able to successfully fund these efforts with DVD pre-orders and donations from people who support them. When you have a reputation for producing quality work, people will be willing to support you in making more. The game they produced, Yo Frankie!, may not be actively developed, but it does serve to prove that this model can be very successful. In less than one year and with a very small crew of people, they were able to make a fully functional game with impressive graphics. This is a testament to the viability of free gaming. 

The possibilities don't end there, and hopefully with these examples it becomes clearer how free gaming can advance with enough interest. Free gaming will never look like the world of proprietary games today. They won't use DRM to prevent you from sharing them, and they won't limit your freedom otherwise. We can look forward to games which are not crippled by antifeatures, and are able to build upon each other to develop faster than they would have otherwise. We should in fact take it as a great sign when critical questions that were once raised against free software as whole are now just pinned on one subset of software. Now, next time anyone asks, we should have a good answer for them.