The new architecture is Internet-based. The Internet communication protocols will shape all communications technologies for the near future. Creativity is assisted by networks into a faster, more transparent and more intense collaboration. They can facilitate collaborative creativity. This way of working is more efficient and produces better results than single working in the conventional manner. In collaborative creativity, everybody is given equal, meritocratic access to the same body of knowledge and is able to contribute to its development in a free, open and collaborative manner. It is easy, in such a fluid environment, to lose control of one’s ideas and products, and to have them replaced by others.
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, put no proprietary restrictions on the source code which constitutes his program’s essential design elements. Nor did the devisers of GNU (the operating system which uses the Linux kernel). They gave away the source code for free on two grounds: first as a moral absolute that nobody should own something as basic as computer code; and second on the intellectual and economic grounds that private ownership inhibits growth. Torvalds says that the person who wants to own source code is like a man who, having invented a printing press, also wants to own the letters so that everyone who wants to rearrange letters into words and words into sentences has to seeks his permission. Free software references are more detailed in the next chapter.
The proponents of open source have different views about how far this openness should go. They agree that a program’s source code should remain for ever in the public domain. They also agree that the program’s code may be sold commercially, and many companies sell Linux packages. Richard Stallman, the originator of GNU and leader of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) argues that code, in any form, must never be privatized. He has devised a General Public Licence (GPL) which functions as a copyright licence under the Berne convention and puts a program permanently in the public domain. It is called copyleft because it does the opposite of copyright. Instead of restraining how people use materials, it liberates them. For the copyleft provisions, refer to the appendix section. [1]
