This Summer, I quietly and with no fanfare posted this guide to How to Free Your Work at QuestionCopyright.org. Nobody pays attention to anything in the Summer, but now it’s Fall, schools are in session, and things are happening, so consider this an announcement: How to Free Your Work is live and you should go check it out.
If you’d rather hear it live from the source, I’ll be giving a workshop on the same topic October 5th in Brooklyn. Register here.
Read it – not bad. But there may be even more to it than that.
Donations may work once you release to the masses and your project has already gained enough momentum. But what when you release something special for very few people? E.g. when the whole market worldwide is like 10,000 users and you can be glad to have a share of 2% in 5 years?
Merchandise: nice idea. But again it is for B2C mass media and doesn’t work for B2B or special fields. And – no offense – but I’m here to make free software, not to sell funny T-Shirts and coffee mugs.
Distribution: again it’s a mass media problem. I believe the far more interesting problem is how to get consumer attention. When there are just few people in the world needing what you can give them, building up a critical mass is far more difficult and I must admit that this is a problem I also haven’t solved yet.
Archiving … I’m not sure that this has anything to do with free licenses at all. Again: it requires a critical mass that I believe 90% of all free projects out there will not have.
I’ve noted down some suggestions that go beyond art and also discuss some other aspects, including free licenses for B2B products. Perhaps you would like to take a look. It might provide you with even more arguments to support your cause.
Link is: http://all-community.de/articles/?stories/copyright_vs_copyleft
I hope this is useful.
Woohoo! Thank you, Nina. That’s very instructive 🙂
Thanks for this post Nina. It can motivate all the people who want to make some donation. I also donating also. 🙂