User:Jasper van Loenen/RWRM/essay-2-outline

Rough ideas while reading some texts on open source / free culture
Cory Doctorow - Content
Lawrence Lessing - Free Culture
Lawrence Lessing - Remix
Chris Anderson - Free

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One of the reasons for me to choose the PZI Networked Media course was the course's attitude towards open-source / free / libre ways of working. I really like the open way of approaching whatever it is you're doing, instead of claiming absolute ownership over what we make; it is easy to say, "this is my project, I came up with it, so you can't have it." All students are encouraged to put their work online, including code (snippets)

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When at the Nederlands Instituut voor Media Kunst (NIMK) in Amsterdam, I saw a piece by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec called City Velocities. Vrhovec Sambolec is credited as being the artist, while software development is done by Mr. Stock and Marije Baalman and hardware development is done by Rene Wassenburg. When I see this list of names I always kind of cringe. Thinking of an idea but letting others execute it for me always feels like cheating. I find it really important that I work on my project from start to finish.

But when I make something, I too often draw from other designers/programmers knowledge. For example: together with Bart I made the Poking Machine. As we describe the device online: “The Poking Machine is a wearable device that pokes you physically whenever you are poked on Facebook, no matter where you are.” When building this device, there were multiple problems we had to solve, the main being we had to find a way to connect it to the internet, and to move a motor so it could poke. Both problems were solved by looking online for example codes of these two functions. I found a script to connect to a internet enabled phone using bluetooth, and a set of commands used to control small motors. Since I combined both these scripts in a (further) self written program and created the hardware needed (which is also based on a example I found online) it feels as if it is my project. But how does this differ from Vrhovec Sambolec who also used the knowledge of others to create his projects? In the case of City Velocity, he didn’t create the piece himself, but did credit the ones who did. In the Poking Machine we did put all the elements together ourselves, but we didn’t credit the ones who wrote the example codes. For me the question is: should we?

You could argue that the codes copied are just building blocks, implementations of systems built by the developers of the programming environment. After having changed them to suit my needs, they have become my versions of the implementations. On the other hand my program wouldn't have worked without the help they've given me.

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Two of my roommates have a laser cutting company. While experimenting they came across a way to make wood bendable by cutting a certain pattern into sheets of wood. They then did two thing: first, they used this technique in the design of a wooden notepad cover. This became a product they are selling through there website. Secondly, they uploaded the design, including all of the technical drawings to thingiverse.com, an online collection of objects made using digital fabrication techniques such as laser-cutting and 3d-printing. Instead of keeping the design to themselves they shared it with the large online community of other digital fabrication enthusiasts - including other laser-cutting companies. Until now nobody has copied the wooden covers (to my knowledge) and claimed it was theirs. What did happen was that their folding system was featured on multiple blogs, resulting in a lot of orders for the covers and a wide spread of their company name. Since then, a lot of new designs using the flexible wood have been made and uploaded to thingiverse, all of which are labeled as being derivatives of the ‘original’ folding mechanism.