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Why giving away great stuff
is such a great idea
Good ideas are worth money, so why are people giving them
away for free? Join our experiment to find out.
Based on old and well established traditions in the radio
amateur and radio hobbyist world, HCDX is offering our information
free of charge, free to circulate, free to distribute, free
to use and modify.
Why?
Because we believe that is has been proven through the years
that we all benefit from this free circulation of knowledge.
Our information may be photocopied, redistributed,
re-edited, rewritten, cut and pasted onto websites, handbills
and articles all over the world.
And that's the point.
We don't want to control this information. It comes from
all of us, and thus it belongs to all of us.
This doesn't mean that there are no copyrights.
There is!
Any work is copyrighted by the author.
All rights to a particular
work are reserved by the author.
But it may be copied, distributed
and/or modified as long as it follows the conditions set
down in the Design
Science License, which grants as much freedom
as possible, as long as you too release your version under
the same copyleft terms and conditions.
Open source has proved a very successful way of writing
software. Now some of its supporters are trying out its
methods elsewhere. Already there's open source music, open
source encyclopaedias, open source law, even open source
soft drinks.
Open source has also come to embody a political stand--one
that values freedom of expression, mistrusts corporate power,
and is uncomfortable with private ownership of knowledge.
It's "a broadly libertarian view of the proper relationship
between individuals and institutions", according to open
source guru Eric Raymond.
But it's not just software companies that lock knowledge
away and release it only to those prepared to pay. Every
time you buy a CD, a book, a copy of New Scientist, even
a can of Coca-Cola, you're forking out for access to someone
else's intellectual property. Your money buys you the right
to listen to, read or consume the contents, but not to rework
them, or make copies and redistribute them. No surprise,
then, that people within the open source movement have asked
whether their methods would work on other products. As yet
no one's sure--but plenty of people are trying it.
And the experiment goes on.
As a contribution to it, the New
Scientist has published an article under the
terms of "copyleft", wanting to test "one of the boldest
ideas of our time".
Here at HCDX we have worked under copyleft conditions
for years, even when there were no such term. We just wanted
to follow the traditions of free flow of information in
some parts of the radio hobby world, both in Scandinavia
and the United States.
Knowing the gains and benefits, we heartily welcome all
newcomers in the world of "copyleft".
Hermod Pedersen, hcdx editor, January 2002
Last Updated Tuesday, October 14 2003
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