A call to arms for the open source community

Lessig urges flexibility, use of Creative Commons license.

The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo kicked off last week with a keynote address by Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, who told a packed audience the open source community's work doesn't end with an operating system and applications. The battle now is in creating a free culture in which the creation and consumption of content are not hindered by stringent copyright laws, Lessig said. He said that while large media and network companies such as Amazon, Apple, AT&T and Comcast may be controlling how people consume content, there is a growing "read-write" culture in which content is modified and shared via the Internet.

He used a series of videos that combined animation and news or movie footage with music to show how people are reusing content to create political messages or humor. The trouble is that copyright regulations turn such creations into acts of piracy, he said.

The open source community needs to take its free-software philosophy into the realm of content to help foster a more free-flowing environment for innovation, he said. He urged the use of the Creative Commons license, which reserves some instead of all rights, allowing for content to be reused and modified, somewhat as software code is used and shared in the open source community.

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The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo kicked off last week with a keynote address by Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, who told a packed audience the open source community's work doesn't end with an operating system and applications. The battle now is in creating a free culture in which the creation and consumption of content are not hindered by stringent copyright laws, Lessig said. He said that while large media and network companies such as Amazon, Apple, AT&T and Comcast may be controlling how people consume content, there is a growing "read-write" culture in which content is modified and shared via the Internet.

He used a series of videos that combined animation and news or movie footage with music to show how people are reusing content to create political messages or humor. The trouble is that copyright regulations turn such creations into acts of piracy, he said.

The open source community needs to take its free-software philosophy into the realm of content to help foster a more free-flowing environment for innovation, he said. He urged the use of the Creative Commons license, which reserves some instead of all rights, allowing for content to be reused and modified, somewhat as software code is used and shared in the open source community.

Virtualization is about more than server consolidation, and enterprise customers need to understand how to take advantage of the technology to create a dynamic infrastructure that responds to business demands, a panel of industry experts said during a virtualization-focused session at LinuxWorld. Virtualization was high on the list at the show, where attendees were looking at how best to deploy Linux and open source in critical business environments.

"As soon as people move away from consolidation and start thinking about neat new uses of virtualization for application migration and service-oriented architectures, virtualization will take off," said Jim Fister, lead technical strategist for Intel's Digital Enterprise Group.