Monday August 31, 2009 Mine, all mine (& theirs too)
One of our design principles for blogs.sun.com over the years has been to allow everything and let good sense and existing rules prevent mishaps - at least until it's clear we need a new rule of some kind. It's been almost entirely effective, and the few cases where it hasn't have been quickly addressed by the Sun blogger community on an internal mailing list that almost every blogger subscribes to. Self-policing definitely beats supervision. Another design principle has been to encourage people to be themselves, and mix up the technical and the personal in their blogging. The resulting blogs have often been compelling and we've grown an unmatched bench of authentic, respected voices.
Of course, those principles leave unanswered questions. One of the questions Sun's present context has raised is, "who owns the blog content?" It's not obvious, since the postings include a mix of personal and Sun content, are posted on a Sun property but often in personal time, and so on. To make it crystal clear, Sun has created a licensing option for every employee that simply shares ownership of everything that's posted equally between Sun and the blogger. That allows Sun to continue to host blogs.sun.com in perpetuity and it allows employees to sort out their own uses for their content. I want to write a book for example, and other want to move their blog to their own domain.
The new license was rolled out today, to accompany the handy new function to export all blog content for use with (for example) WordPress. From now on, every Sun blogger has (if they choose to accept the new license) a clear, documented set of rights to their blogging content. Huge thanks to the team of people that made it happen, especially my favourite lawyer, Tiki Dare, who completely "gets" this stuff and without whose quiet and largely unsung help the open source community would be much the poorer.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 31 2009, 08:30:59 AM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [4]
☞ Policy and Plots
-
Seems obvious to me that the US was built on the entrepreneurship of immigrants and that shutting them down will lead to decline. After all, the comfortable are rarely hungry for change. So the article itself isn't very interesting to me. But the comments - they are are an often sad eye-opener.
-
Watching the UK government attempting to go down the anti-citizen three-strikes route. Presumably some politician has been lobbied by the copyright old-guard and told the only solution to "theft" (AKA unmanaged market-creation) is to whip the entire population randomly until they forsake progress. We need to get some voices of wisdom into this debate, but unfortunately the consultation system is structured in favour of businesses rather than citizens.
-
Of course, every company is using its spending power to lobby in DC so while this alleged activity is completely in character, I fully expect that other businesses are engaging actively in similar anti-competitive lobbying in both Washington and Brussels. I heard rumours that certain Oracle competitiors were encouraging the US and EU authorities to engage in long investigations of the Sun acquisition, for example. No data, but it's to be expected. The best solution? Bringing it out into the daylight and requiring all lobbying activity to be documented.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 31 2009, 07:30:35 AM PDT )
Permalink
