On the creative commons...

Copyright is a lie told to the poor starving artists and writers by the wealthy publishing barons who are making money hand over fist on their work.

The way those publishing barons do business - they have big print runs to sell, and if they see their sales drop or rise, they get mad, and act irrationally.

It happens so rarely that anyone will try to make a living selling what rightly belongs to someone else. I've combed the internet for years and I've seen it maybe twice. The fact is, no one has the confidence to set up shop for very long selling someone else's work (unless it's officially in the public domain).

Now, think about the sahara desert and the pacific ocean. One has to understand where value comes from, and where it goes to. The proportions of value to the need for it by consumers, and need for it by people generally, is like that metaphor of the ocean and the desert; the proportions are just about like that. Of course, no one sets up flowing taps of salt water - so we could think about desalinization here. A starving artist or writer, or musician, or filmmaker, or computer programmer is like a person who spends years, ornately fashioning one little ornate spigot of fresh water, desalinized from the ocean - but on the coastline in the middle of nowhere. People might never find his spigot. That's the biggest hazard he faces, as someone who needs to feed the kids each day.

By contrast, there might be someone setting up a sea port a hundred miles away. That person has built a desalinization plant. A person builds a seaport with the intention of other people setting up businesses on the little streets which spread out from his own lonely establishment on the coast.

This is what microsoft has done. Their business model is deeper than what consumers themselves see. A consumer buys a disc every few years for a couple hundred dollars, and gets a new operating system. What the consumer does not think about is all the elves which are working on the streets outside of Bill Gates' workshop. He and apple took very divergent courses fifteen years ago, when they parceled out the personal computer market between eachother. Microsoft decided to focus a lot on helping people in that seaport to live well. He opened up his computer, and gave people easy ways to make a living. He basically gave people the parts to work with, for free... anyone could pick up five little parts which microsoft manufactured out of a free candy shop company store of thousands of different kinds of specialized equipment - and that person could forge ahead with a business of creating whatever his imagination led him to make out of those parts. It's called "being an independent developer." A microsoft executive recently referred to them as "pawns" on a chessboard.

I can write a computer program with five lines of text... which makes a nice little artistic looking button, which is wired to some internal machinery function which is already hidden behind the scenes in microsoft's windows xp. This button would take me five minutes to design - and I could sell it to people as "my own software." Microsoft encourages this.

Other parts of the microsoft empire were built, by encouraging what is known as "oem manufacturers" - college students with garages were encouraged to create the physical computer equipment which microsoft's windows 98 me or XP would run on. In this case the parts you use are not free, but building a computer is about as simple as putting together legos. Apple by contrast, was creating a very closed system. Ever since the black and white macintosh - they gave people a lot fewer options with how they could set up shop under their auspices

Apple was following common sense - they wanted to maintain quality control over the entire production process. Microsoft was being a maverick. They had this wild-eyed dream that they could harness the work of hundreds of thousands of people who were unmonitored, and who were paying themselves - creating with their own wit, using microsoft's provisions.

So Bill Gates ends up making a bigger seaport, than Steve Jobs does.

In fact, the freeware/shareware movement, and now the "open source software movement" is being spearheaded by those who spent their figurative childhoods, playing in the streets of the microsoft seaport.

So, I believe people should be encouraged to use the creative commons license with one's works... and seek one's fortune that way.

Now, the reader will notice that I myself, do put a copyright mark on the bottom of each of my essays on this website. Mostly, that's because I want to have my quiet life for awhile. I'm not making any money yet with my work, and I'm keeping my options open. That's not hypocritical. It's just that I'm not trying to build that seaport in all it's glory yet.