This document is not written by me, but participated in the process along with others.  I am a signatory to the declaration.  I urge you to consider thinking about the issues raised and even if you agree with at least 80%, consider adding your signature.  Please continue to participate in the dialogue to create a sustainable creative commons.

We can no longer put off re-thinking the economic structures that have been producing, financing and funding culture up until now. Many of the old models have become anachronistic and detrimental to civil society. The aim of this document is to promote innovative strategies to defend and extend the sphere in which human creativity and knowledge can prosper freely and sustainably.

This document is addressed to policy reformers, citizens and free/libre culture activists to provide them practical tools to actively operate this change.  Read the full documents from the links given below.

FCForum Declaration: Sustainable Models for Creativity in the Digital Age [2 pages]

How To for Sustainable Creativity [30 pages]

1. Who Generates Culture?

In order to develop and grow, the human capacity for creativity requires access to existing culture, knowledge and information. Everyone can contribute to the production of culture, values and wealth on different scales, ranging from very basic to very complex creative contributions. The resources and time required for creative activities also vary in scale. We want to promote ways of liberating this time and these resources so that the distributed potential can be deployed in a sustainable way.

2. Basic Principles for Sustainable Creativity

1. The restructuration of the cultural industries is not only necessary but inevitable.
2. More culture is created and circulates in the digital era than ever before: in this context sharing has proved to be essential to the disseminate culture.
3. The profits that the cultural lobbies are fighting to defend are based on the artificial production of scarcity.
4. The cultural sphere needs to recognise the skills and contributions of all of its agents, not only producers.
5. The digital context benefits creators as well as entrepreneurs and civil society. Appropriate models make it easier for users, consumers and producers to gain access to each other. The role of middle-men has to be revised in light of an approach based on collaboration.
6. The Internet is an essential tool for establishing contact between creators and their audiences. This is one of the reasons why everybody must be guaranteed non-discriminatory access to it.
7. Governments that don’ t promote the new forms of creation and diffusion of culture are generating lost profits for society and destroying its cultural diversity.
8. As Free/Libre Software has shown, peer production and distribution are not incompatible with market strategies and commercial distribution.

Economic Models for Sustainable Creativity

The following list starts with the models that are most similar to those traditionally accepted by the cultural industries, and moves towards those that are closer to the idea of sharing that pertains to our age. Many of these models are currently actively implemented and are already working. We need to expand these conditions by removing barriers that limit their growth.

1. Pay for what you get

Or some advice for the restructuring of the cultural industries: the public is prepared to pay for cultural products or goods as long as they deem the price to be reasonable and paying does not restrict their freedom. Make it easy and accessible; make it affordable; don’ t make it compulsory, static and criminalised, make it optional and offer choice. Pay fair wages when you contract professional work.

2. Advertising

Between bombarding users with ads and the total absence of ads, there are intermediate, ethical options: Selective ads (accepting advertisements only from projects with affinities); giving users control over the consumption of ads; allowing users to request ads related to the article they are reading, for instance, …

3. Pay for a Plus

Sharing copies helps creators to build up a reputation, which then becomes the base for charging for services and other things that cannot be copied, such as live performances, works-for-hire, specially designed gadgets, attractive physical copies…

4. Freemium

Freemium is a business model that works by offering basic services, or a basic downloadable digital product, for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features.

5. Contributions

A contribution-based model enables users to donate sums of money in order to help sustain a given project or enterprise. The more involved and respected users feel, the better this system works.

6. Crowdfunding

Enabling individual citizens or entities to contribute to a cultural enterprise by becoming stakeholders. This contribution can take the form of an investment before the work has been created, or via micro or macro credits or donations towards existing works.

7. Commons-based strategies and distributed value creation

The providers of commercial platforms for cooperation share their revenues with the creators who produce the material that makes their services valuable, while commoners are able to freely share and exploit the commons.

8. Collective Financing System

A flat-rate on internet connections can be consider only if it implies an equitable and democratic resource- pooling system and recognizes citizens rights to share and re-use works freely.

9. Basic income

When connecting the issue of free culture to visions of large-scale social transformations in capitalistic economies, the basic income idea propose to sustain the society as a productive body. A guaranteed basic income is a way to avoid precarity and redistribute economic wealth.

10. Public funding/policy making

We believe that in the context of a society of tax payers, culture must receive a share of public investment due to its undeniable social value. Social funding should not be seen as a substitute for public responsibilities in relation to the funding of culture and Free/Libre culture should not constitute an anomaly.

1. Publicly funded works should be released, after a reasonable commercial life span, for circulation on digital networks so that the public who paid for them can access and re-use them.
2. Tax deductions should promote micro-funding and the release of works without restrictive licences.
3. The public should have the option to contribute to deciding how this public investment in culture is shared out.
4. Alternative distribution channels should be encouraged. Cultural policies must work towards achieving greater cultural diversity and sustainable collaboration platforms.
5. Networks of independent producers, distributors and authors should be supported, and they should be represented on public broadcasting.
6. Impact statements should be a prerequisite for the introduction of any new cultural policy. We must analyze the effects that proposed regulations would have on on the cultural and knowledge commons before they are implemented.

Results

The Commons, Public Domain and Business

The new business models that consider collective production as a context that needs to be nurtured and safeguarded, and not simply as a context to exploit, are based on the premise that cooperation is compatible with market dynamics. The most evocative practical examples stem from free software communities. The “output” is shared under non-restrictive licences, allowing third parties to use and modify it as long as the same freedoms are obligatorily applied to derived works. This creates a commons that is constantly improved by successive contributions, while not preventing the commercial exploitation of the knowledge and skills arising from them and of the works themselves.

Users become generators of value, and join a virtuous circle of production and consumption that they benefit from.

Meanwhile, in this new context, it is necessary to defend, promote and implement the conditions that enable online collaboration.

Embroiled in a different logic, the traditional cultural industries want to keep feeding off collective production, without responding to the collaborative logic that is now current thanks to the Internet. These industries try to keep imposing appropriation frameworks onto the commons, becoming entrenched in a predatory idea of culture (the economy of scarcity), which is totally at odds with the philosophy of free culture (the economy of abundance).

We request all those who read this page to suggest any changes before Monday 13th September 2010, so that the declaration can be released sooner than later.   The draft is uploaded on the wiki page.

The text is pasted here for broad dissemination.

The Role of ICT and Education in Social Inclusion

Information & Communication Technology (ICT) is one of the most powerful technologies ever developed by humankind. It has drastically changed the way we do things, the way we communicate and even the way we think. Education is one of the spheres of human activity that is being strongly influenced by ICT. While the teaching of ICT has been incorporated at the school-level, ICT itself is being used in the classroom and outside for teaching and learning more effectively. However, access to ICT is not universal due to various reasons, including obscurity and the high cost of proprietary software.

Education is a basic requirement for a comfortable life in today’s society. In view of this, some countries, including India, have made it a fundamental right. This is certainly a move in the right direction. Education in ICT and ICT-enabled education are also becoming wide-spread. Part of the reason for this is the rapid decline in the cost of hardware. At the same time, the high cost of software is acting as a hurdle for further progress. Another factor that prevents more wide-spread use of ICT is the fact that the interface is not available in many languages, which bothers a lot of people.

Obscurity stops people and especially students to learn how things work, software in particular. The right to use, know, change and share technical knowledge about modern artefacts is an essential human right in knowledge societies.

Why is Software Freedom a necessity and not a choice?

Proprietary software does not allow community participation in shaping the ICT to be used for education, and is not suitable for education since their solutions treat students as consumers. Free software community (sometimes called free and open source software community) on the other hand produced GNU/Linux operating system and a comprehensive stack of collaborative workspaces that enable students during the last 25 years. Most of the free software workspaces are made accessible for speakers of all languages of the world, including physically challenged students. The software freedom granted to the people (1. to use the software for any purpose; 2. to study how it works; 3. to modify it and 4. to distribute the modified software) is unquestionably the core source of the free software revolution that is being witnessed. Any software that grants these four freedoms is called Free Software. These freedoms are essential for students to learn how things work, and to share their experience, knowledge and collaborate with others without legal encumbrances.

The software freedom makes it eminently suitable for any purpose, especially for education. The software used in education has to be freely available and accessible to all because education has to be universal. Moreover, the software has to be available in the language used by the community in that part of the world, however small the community may be. This is normally not possible with proprietary software because some communities could be too small to satisfy the commercial interests of the company.

But the situation is different with Free Software. Since the source code is available for study and modification by anyone, students of computer science and software engineering are able to see code written by master programmers and learn from them, just as students of literature learn from works of great writers, or students of art or cinema learn from the works of great artists and movie makers. This is obviously not possible with proprietary software.

Any community that has people with reasonable software skills can customise the interface to show the menu and other items in their own language. They can also create fonts for the language if they are not available. And they can localise applications to suit their culture and environment.

Finally, the students who have computers in their homes can use the same software they use in their educational institutions without either breaking the law and using illegal software, or spending a lot of money to buy the same software.

Thus, Free Software is undeniably the most ideal for use in all educational institutions at all levels; for primary, secondary or higher education. Proprietary software keeps people divided and helpless, while Free Software empowers them. Free software nurtures the much needed creativity by encouraging us to critical thinking and reasoning while proprietary software forces us to consume what they pack.

It is important for the graduating students to become entrepreneurs or join the various agencies for employment. Considering this requirement it is essential that the syllabus in educational institutions focuses on skills and does not include any specific branded applications. Therefore, the syllabus should be neutral and not mention any particular brand.

Just as the software requires to be free, it is essential that learning and teaching resources including documentation, books, journals, and other media should be released with a license (such as Creative Commons by Share Alike) which grants similar freedoms for other resources. All these resources must also be encoded in an open standard so that the exchanged documents are decodable in all platforms ensuring interoperability.

Therefore

considering all the reasons mentioned above, we, the undersigned, call on all educational institutions, policy makers, students and teachers in all corners of the world to discard all proprietary software and use exclusively Free Software.

न चौर हार्यम न च राज हार्यम |

न भ्रात्रभाज्यम न च भारकारी ||

व्यये कृते वर्धते नित्यं |

विद्या धनं सर्वे धनं प्रधानम्  ||

Knowledge can neither be stolen by a thief, nor snatched by a king.

It is indivisible unlike ancestral property, it never burdens the bearer,

it multiplies manifold when offered to others.

Knowledge is the supreme form of wealth.

The college does not seem to use free software as of now, but has intentions to use.  The vice chairman of the MET trust Mr. Sunil G. Karve mentioned that free software goes well with their philosophy.  I do hope, it will eventually go well with their practice as well.

If any of you know the exact source of this verse, please let me know.

• Phoenix (Computer Interfaced Science Experiments)
• Step (An interactive physics simulator, part of KDE-EDU package)
• GeoGebra (A dynamic Geometry and Algebra Platform)
• KTurtle (A simple turtle graphics program using LOGO for children)
• Inkscape (An advanced vector (SVG) graphics editor)
• Stellarium (A planetarium for your computer)

Many of them are well known, except Step.  I want to therefore say few words about it.  This program will have a great role to play for physics education. An excellent platform for learning as well as teaching.  If you are a physics teacher or an educator, consider using Step.  Though the program needs several finishing touches (sometimes eats up resources while simulating complex systems), the author (Vladimir Kuznetsov) is ambitious and did a fantastic job.  Once this program is improved, it will be a classic tool for education in the high school and college level physics.

Geogebra also gives the same experience for mathematics.

These are all free software for education.  I encourage teachers to use them in the classroom, and students who own a PC must install GNU/Linux on their PCs and enjoy these applications among several others.

The papers are available from the Semantic Web archives and the CEUR site.

More about GNOWSYS-mode from the gnowledge lab’s site.

Meanwhile, I reactivated my application to try again and discovered that the site does not work with Mozilla Firefox but manages to work with Konqueror.  The fields in the application however are misaligned in most places.  It is difficult to say without further investigation whether this is due to bad coding on the server side or on the browser side.  I could not test it through the process since no date before 21st of October 2009 is possible even under emergency category, therefore I gave up.

Free software users are increasing in number all over the world.  Unless such roadblocks are cleared we cannot build a greener digital environment. Fight for freedom even if it is expensive!

2^nd October 2009

Mumbai

From:

Dr. Nagarjuna G. Reader(F), Homi Bhabha Centre, TIFR, V.N. Purav Marg, Mankhurd Mumbai 400088

To:

Ambassador Timothy J. Roemer The Ambassador of United States of America

Sub – An Open Letter Addressed to the Ambassador of the United States, Department of State

Dear Sir,

I write to bring to your notice an unfair practice followed by the U.S. Embassy in India, Department of State, namely, an imposition on all citizens to use a particular proprietary commercial software in order to submit their application for visa.

This is how it happens.

All applications for a U.S. visa from India are done through the Visa Facilitation Services (VFS). The procedure is to first pay the visa fee, wait for two days or till the number gets activated, and then proceed through the filling of forms at the website (http://www.vfs-usa.co.in). As I did the above, along the way I found that the VFS site did not work with my Mozilla Firefox browser. On inquiring with VFS I found that the site works with Microsoft Internet Explorer only.

As a regular user of the GNU/Linux operating system, I do not use any proprietary software either at work or at home, hence I found this an unwarranted restriction on my individual freedom.

Despite these reservations I borrowed a friend’s laptop which runs the proprietary Microsoft Operating System, filled my form, and got an appointment for the 1st of October 2009. I was pressured into doing this, having already paid Rs. 57,000/- as registration fee for attending a conference (http://iswc2009.semanticweb.org/), having then paid the visa processing fee of about Rs. 6,000/-, and having requested for, and granted, financial support for my air-travel from my office (http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in). With two of my presentations scheduled at the above conference, meetings fixed with professional colleagues in the U.S., and the time running out, I thought too much was at stake, let me compromise on my moral values and follow the advice of the VFS.

However, on reflecting on the situation I felt that this compromise of my principles was helping promotion of the unfair use of non-inter operable technology to impose restrictions on citizens. As the Chairperson of Free Software Foundation of India I have been advocating the use of free software like the GNU/Linux operating system and non-proprietary browsers and application for every citizen. As a part of my professional commitment, I develop free software, and my visit to the USA, is for the purpose of presenting my free software to the International community. My conscience thus does not permit to go ahead and attend the interview as scheduled.

I consider it a serious infringement of individual freedom when the U.S. Embassy in India, Department of State, endorses and promotes the use of a specific operating system and a software application, while other competing applications, like Mozilla Firefox, and GNU/Linux operating system, could have also performed the same job if the software used was inter operable and standards complaint. If the U.S. Embassy agrees that it is an unfair restriction, I expect that you would ask VFS to fix the problem as soon as possible. Not fixing this problem would amount to a support of monopoly trade practices and non-adherence to interoperability by the U.S. Government.

Until this problem is fixed, or unless I am assured that it will be fixed sooner rather than later, I have decided, as a mark of protest, not to apply again for a visa interview to visit the United States.

I urge that you do not interpret this gesture as mark of disrespect for your country. I have enormous regard for the way individual liberty as well as intellectual freedom is valued and protected within the United States. I would definitely be happy to reconsider my decision if I receive a positive response from you on this issue.

I have to leave for U.S. on 21st of October 2009, so time is running out. I request you to please respond as early as possible and restore my faith that the U.S. will respect individual freedom and provide me an option that will not enforce the use of Microsoft Internet Explorer for taking my next appointment.

“You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.” –Mahatma Gandhi

It is with this spirit that I write this letter on the birthday of one of the greatest freedom fighters, Mahatma Gandhi.

Thanking you

Yours sincerely

(Nagarjuna G)

Read here: the journal on free open source law launched.

The network is taking shape at http://fosscomm.in. One of the first tasks the network will be working is to get the open standards policy document for eGovernance in India approved without yielding to those groups who promote the interests of proprietary software groups (like NASSCOM, MAIT, who are influencing the Indian Govt to make room for RAND and multiple standards).  Currently, the apex committee does not contain members who represent the FOSS community.  Therefore one of the immediate objectives of the new network of FOSS advocates is to request the Govt to include FOSS representatives in the apex body.