Andrius Kulikauskas: Public Domain vs. Licenses

[Andrius Kulikauskas]

Dear Richard Stallman, Thank you for your question. I will share my response more broadly. This will encourage our debates!

My own interest in the Public Domain is as a foundation for online social networking. I founded the Minciu Sodas laboratory in 1998 for serving and organizing independent thinkers. All of our venues have been "Public Domain except as noted
otherwise". We have had about 1,000 authors participate.

We have written some 30,000 letters 4,000 wiki pages and have an active online chat room with an archive all in the Public Domain.
In a similar spirit, this year in Kenya we organized a Pyramid of Peace
http://www.pyramidofpeace.net with more than 100 peacemakers
on-the-ground to whom we distribute thousands of dollars worth of phone
credit under condition that they let us publicly post their telephone
numbers on the Internet.

I provide free services to our participants who "work for free" by
working openly in the Public Domain on their endeavors. The result is
that we filter in for sharing, self-directed people and we filter out
for those who are selfish and destructive. This for me is the real
value of the Public Domain, it is a litmus test for those who wish to
contribute to a commons and care for it. In this way we have network of
self-directed people who have grown to work together and are ready for
mobilization to help a client who provides direction and funding and
wants momentum and is willing that we meet them halfway as we each
pursue our own projects. An example is the 2,000 stories that we
collected for My Food Story for Greg Wolff of Unamesa Assocation

Code likes to clump, but content likes to crumble. Richard, if you
write a one-page statement, there is likely a sentence or paragraph that
may stand out that I or others may like to use. Or your work may
provide the basis for a wiki page that evolves further. By placing your
work in the Public Domain you agree to participate in such a culture.
Your decision either way shows your aptitude for such collective work.
Is it worth investing energy to reach out to you? Or should I devote
myself to working with Fred Kayiwa in Uganda who is willing to work in
the Public Domain? For me the answer is clear and lets me reach out to
include all based on their aptitude for giving, which is to say, give to
the givers. If he has energy, then he can reach out to you. At some
point we hope to include you, but the ones who are most giving are the
ones who are most central. I myself have given thousands of letters to
the Public Domain and all of my creative work.

We are organizing an Ethical Public Domain which fosters a culture that
is ethical rather than legal. Code is happy to clump and have thousands
of programs in one distribution. But content likes to crumble and
wishes for a free trade zone of ideas. The basic requirements of
copyright and copyleft hinder the use of one's own best judgement. Any
license requires a work to be delineated, the license to be specified
and tracked, the steward of that work to be identified, and then
permissions to be requested! This is an impractical burden for an
organizer like me who is fostering a new culture. And it is a failure
to encourage a free give and take of each other's ideas that allows us
to play out the culture that we would like to share. Rather than depend
on the force of the legal system and a justice system which I have no
interest or opportunity to participate in, I wish to engage others in an
ethical system and culture system that we can create together.