[NetBehaviour] Why Net Art Software Should Be AGPL-Licenced

[Rob Myers]

Thanks for your comments.

Yes, it's bizarre when people think that freedom and artistic (or at least
career) success are somehow opposed.

James - If people don't need the code to immediately experience the work
then the case for making it AGPL is less clear but it won't hurt to protect
people's freedom to experience and study ("use") the software. I currently
think of "use" of software as "interaction", but that can get misleading. I
blogged about this kind of thing as it affects microblog (Twitter) bots
recently:

http://robmyers.org/weblog/2009/06/source.html

Security can be a concern when you publish code but I've had people send me
bug fixes for code that I've put online so hopefully people would be at
least as likely to point out security problems and help you fix them as to
exploit them.

Pall - It's frustrating when people who haven't written Linux, GNU, Apache,
MySQL or Perl get righteous about other people "stealing" the idea for their
net art script. Possibly they think someone is going to use Pere Ubu's
de-braining machine on them... It's even more frustrating when you realise
that making the script free software would be better for them from a career
point of view than making it proprietary.

Having a separate server for running free software net art on is better for
both security and freedom. I keep a Git repository of my work on my laptop
and publicly on my server and I must start mirroring it to gitorious.org.
Spread your ideas and they will increase both your reputation and the
robustness of your backup strategy. ;-)

- Rob.
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