week 12 lecture

Hi!
Week 12's lecture was about 'Free Software, Open Source, Creative Commons, Electronic Frontiers Foundation.' So the gist of free and open source software, including the 'copyleft' concept of having free stuff on the Net, was founded by Richard M Stallman, and it is basically software that anyone can access and share for free. This is a nice change to having to pay for your proprietry software. So everyone can benefit from free and open source software, unlike proprietry software, where only its makers can benefit, and I guess the people who pay loads of money to get it. The creation of this free and open software is obviously hugely beneficial to the many people who use the internet, as outlined by Adam in the lecture as being anyone who has a blog, so anyone in this course, and anyone who even uses a computer and the internet.

The Creative Commons are people who issue licenses so that we can use them on our blogs and various other things, and use information (sensibly of course) without the prospect of being sued by the mega-rich people who can sue us, and belong to 'big corporations.' This has implications for the whole e-democracy concept-the right to freely generate information, leading to discussion and debate, but not having to worry about legal repurcussions.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an organisation dedicated to maintaining freedoms on the Net. As they say; "when our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense." They are concerned with issues like free speech and internet privacy. The internet privacy thing is relevant for their case against AT & T/US government, who they were suing because it was revealed that AT & T (a company like Telstra, from what I can gather??) are allowing the US government access to private records of their customers. So the work of the EFF is doing important and relevant things for rights over the internet.

That's all for now! See ya!