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Pain Free Riding
Gnus and Horses
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"Fear of the Bit" by R. Cook - HTML rendering
Gnus and horses: Free Circulation of Knowledge
A letter from J. Jackson: About a Soundness Scale
What kind of a relation exists
among gnus and horses? Well, both are mammalians, herbivorous, large
sized, used by men... etc.In the mind of some of you, going further what Bill Gates offers to us, gnu is the symbol of a huge project. It's a really revolutionary one, since it hurts our current social rules on some very sensible points: the "intellectual property" and related business, and the circulation of knowledge. The GNU project (really a harsh, recursive acronym, derived from "GNU is Not Unix": GNU community obviously have some joker inside...) consists just in building up and promoting a peculiar kind of license, called "copyleft" as opposite to "copyright" to underline the deep differences among them. Publishing anything under GNU license, the author yields freely his work to the world. Anybody can enter, copy, modify, spread, and even sell that work! But it is not possible to cover that work under a more restrictive copyright. What is born free, has to remain free for ever. Who violates this rule, violates a formal, valid clause of a copyright - and this is a crime that can be pursued byy law.
If you don't know so much about recent developments of informatics and software, you could wonder about the real significance of such a strange license: could be it ever applied in our business-based society? How many fellows would have a hard work, and then give freely the results? And, if any: what about quality of such a work, when compared of the results of leader commercial, business-oriented organizations, paying the best experts in the best technical settings?
Replies to the three questions are: 1) Yes; 2) Many thousands - perhaps millions; 3) The quality is very high - often excellent. There are free, GNU software applications that are the best in their field.
Even the less "computer-addicts" among you perhaps know something about Linux, an excellent Operative System (SO) someway better than Windows, and one from the pillars of Internet; Linux is free and "transparent", and it is deeply linked to GNU project and philosophy. Is it easy too? Well, honestly not. But freedom is never so easy.
The power of GNU projects just consists in the
fact they are free, open, transparent. Since they are free, they
rapidly spread all over. Since they are open, anybody can take a look
into them. Since they are transparent (t.i., without any "trick" to
mask their content), anybody can understand fully them, and to try an
update. Draft updates circulate inside the GNU community, and the best
ones prevail. Internet offers the means to connect GNU informal community and allows lots of knowledge and experience exchanges.
The results from this informal work group are both very effective and unbelievably efficient. From a biologist point of view, it is something very similar to the spring of new species from environmental "chaos".
OK: but ... what a relation among GNU and horses?
From the very beginning, I saw a relation among GNU movement and Barefoot Horse movement. In both cases, one man (Linus Torvalds for GNU; Jaime Jackson for Barefoot Horse movement) took the first step. In both cases, that fellow has been willing to share his own experience with people, from an ethic motivation. In both cases, the news spread on the Web, and lots of women and men all over the world were recruited. They felt free to learn, to try, to suggest updates, to spread knowledge as a gift to a friend.
Marjorie Smith wrote in her beautiful website: "To me, the barefoot movement has these strengths:
1)Horse owners are figuring it out among ourselves -- bringing information from many sources, and field-testing through our own observations and experience, to find what works best
2) While there are excellent teachers giving clinics on how to trim a barefoot horse, also many of us are showing a friend how to trim, deepening the friendship as we share a skill.
3) There are a number of university researchers now studying how hooves work and corroborating our informal field-testing about the benefits of keeping horses barefoot.
When e-mailing the leaders of the Barefoot movement asking their permission to publish an Italian translation of their websites, I always found an unbelievable, friendly, even grateful mind; in my opinion, an obvious sign of their willing for a free knowledge circulation, that is the core of GNU project too.
Some good news, now. Some recent articles on Wikipedia - the free web encyclopedia based on GNU philosophy - come from the Barefoot Movement. Try "barefoot horses" or "natural horsemanship" as an example. A real relation horses-gnus exists by now! I'd like so much that many barefoot resources on the web could be released formally under the terms of a GNU FDL ("Free Documentation License").
Barefoot friends, think about this!