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There is a progression that organizations or individuals will take with their involvement in Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). Using the Government of Canada as an example, I will walk readers through that progression.
The progression would follow the following P's:
There are two angles from which to look at the variety of existing public policy areas that FLOSS touches on: how the policy affects FLOSS, and how FLOSS affects the public policy.
A few key policy areas will be hilighted, but the software and way of looking at knowledge development and governance with FLOSS would touch almost all areas of public policy.
While the powerful media intermediaries have tried to convince people that the greatest threat to creators is copyright infringement facilitated by the Internet and other new communications media tools, the real threat comes from the intermediaries themselves.
Creators realize that they straddle both sides of the creative process as users of other works and creators of derivative works. These creators are very dependant on a healthy and vibrant public domain, and dependant on having control over the tools that they use to create and communicate their works.
Intermediaries seek to try to try to increase the strength of copyright in their favor, trying to suggest that "stronger copyright is always better. Creators know that more is not necesarily better, just as most people can tell the difference between being dehydrated, being healthy, and drowning.
In electronic media, more that worrying about copyright infringement, creators need to be concerned about who controls electronic media tools. If large and powerful intermediaries have monopoly control over the tools, they will be able to leverage this control to restrict creators rights.
Most of us can immagine the harm to creative rights that would have happened if the VCR (and derivative devices like handheld video cameras) had been banned, but this is exactly what the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) was trying to do a decade ago. These same intermediaries are seeking to retain remote control and veto control over all electronic media, a situation that should be recognized as causing considerable harm to creative rights, possibly worse than the abolishing of copyright.
Software is a specific type of creative work, and has its own movement to protect creative rights. The Free Software movement, formalized with the creation of the Free Software Foundation in 1985, was created to protect a software creators right to create software. Where non-free software owners have license agreements which seek to restrict their users in many ways, free software copyright license agreements protect certain freedoms. Specifically, the freedoms it protects are:
Having software be free software does not only help the creative rights of software creators, but since software is put into the control of the community (rather than dominant media and software companies), it also helps protect the creative rights of non-software creators.
