“Gratis & Libre”Liam Wyatt

[[user:witty lama]]

Linux.conf.au 2009Hobart

historians have displayed remarkable amnesia over the intellectual history of their own discipline. They have failed to tease out what was old and what was distinctive in the contemporary debates.1 Ian Tyrrell, Historians in Public: The practice of American history, 1890—1970, 2005:21.

anti-free

Restricting access/copying

Censorship

Destruction

Price

} Libre

Gratis}

<Copyright>

We find ourselves dealing with the bizzare concept of the ‘crime of reason’, the illegality of understanding certain things.” “Courts now sustain patents for hiring strategies, sales techniques and gene sequences.”

Robert Laughlin, The Crime of Reason, 2009

<Censorship>

• Such publishing houses have offered their customers a kind of secular salvation through literacy and an awareness of the power of words and organised information. They were not as incendiary as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels but they played a comparable role in the transformation of society. ...They were to the mind what piped water, cheap soap and good public transport were to the body.12

• Tom McArthur quoted in Jonathon Green, Chasing the Sun, 1996

<Destruction>

“Scarcity, since digital materials are so fragile and can dissapear at the touch of a delete key or a magnetic blip, or abundance, since digital storage makes it possible to save and make [texts] globally available.”

Roy Rosenzweig “Scarcity or Abundance?” in The American Historical Review 2003.

Thank you.

liamwyatt@gmail.com[[user:witty lama]]

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