Lecture Summary - Week 7

Community – Collaboration - Choice.

This week in the New Communication Technologies Lecture we covered 3 main topics. Today’s lecture follows on very nicely from last week’s. The main topics from this week’s lecture relate to the legal issues involved with the production of media (last week’s lecture).

1. What is Creative Commons?
In this week’s lecture, copyright was explained to be like a legally binding contract, and when you create something, you own all copyright creativity. That’s the reason for why ‘Creative Commons’ was introduced. Creative Commons refine your work’s copy rights so other people have the rights to reproduce/use your work. In the lecture we watched two short videos explaining why the creative commons is a useful idea. The first called “Wanna Work Together”, and the second “A Shared Culture”. I recommend sparing a few minutes to visit the following link and watch the short videos. http://creativecommons.org/videos

2. What is Free Software?
Free/Libre, Open Source Software (FLOSS for short). Historically software was free; anyone could contribute, share and reuse source code. “Bazaar Style” (Raymond, 2001). Source code is the instruction written in Programming Languages that tell a computer to do certain things. It is what makes computer software work. The language used for the programming is called ‘Ruby’. The lecture slides imply that we should think of the source code as the recipe for making our favourite food. The source code is then translated into files that can run on specific computers. This part of the process would be like preparing and cooking the recipe from ingredients so it appeals to different people. The Free Software Foundation was created in 1981 by Richard M Stallman.

3. Proprietary Software vs Free Software
Examples of the Proprietary Software model, also known as the closed sources, are MS-Windows, MacOS,MS-Office, Internet Explorer, PhotoShop, etc). The ‘recipe’ metaphor also applies to this. Using Proprietary Software is like signing an agreement that says you can’t tell your friends how to make nice food. Whereas with free software such as Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox and VLC, source codes are freely and openly available. Under limited-rights licence (GPL) anyone can see it, use it and edit it. The software is developed and set by teams of volunteers from within the community.