{"id":124,"date":"2010-07-05T23:34:10","date_gmt":"2010-07-05T22:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/?p=124"},"modified":"2010-07-05T23:34:10","modified_gmt":"2010-07-05T22:34:10","slug":"two-gnus-the-gnu-project-and-the-gnu-gpl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/2010\/07\/two-gnus-the-gnu-project-and-the-gnu-gpl\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Gnus: The Gnu Project and the Gnu GPL"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the next <a title=\"Decoding Digital Humanities meetings\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ucl.ac.uk\/dh\/decoding_digital_humanities\" target=\"_blank\">Decoding Digital Humanities<\/a> meeting, I&#8217;d like to propose reading two fundamental documents of the free software movement, Richard Stallman&#8217;s <a title=\"Stallman, The Gnu Project\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/gnu\/thegnuproject.html\">Gnu Project<\/a> and the <a title=\"The Gnu GPL\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gnu.org\/licenses\/gpl.html\" target=\"_blank\">Gnu GPL<\/a> (General Public License). These texts build on the last meeting&#8217;s reading of Eric Raymond&#8217;s <a title=\"Raymond, The Cathedral and The Bazaar\" href=\"http:\/\/www.catb.org\/~esr\/writings\/cathedral-bazaar\/cathedral-bazaar\/\">The Cathedral and the Bazaar<\/a>, but are less about the process of coding, and more on the programmer in the world. The first is a brief history of sharing code and a plan for a completely free operating system, the second the most popular free software license, designed to protect both sharing and code.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re relevant to the Digital Humanities, and what we&#8217;ve been discussing, in numerous ways:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They show the human culture around the code, both implicitly (styles of writing, ways of thinking about a problem) and explicitly (Stallman&#8217;s description of sharing at MIT). The humanity around the digital, one can say.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>We face very similar problems with sharing other things, like data and findings. That sharing is fundamental to learning; too much material is being locked up under dubious copyright claims and illiterate t&amp;cs, never mind paywalls.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Talking of paywalls, both texts have a subtle attitude to commerce, seemingly unconcerned with money but overtly opposed to monopolisation.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And of course, we use the fruits of these works.<\/p>\n<p>More than that, I think these texts can be read in very different ways: beyond being a license, the GPL can be seen as a &#8216;hack&#8217;, repurposing copyright into copyleft; a history of debate and struggle is found across its three revisions (and its offspring for web-deployed software, the <a title=\"Affero GPL\" href=\"http:\/\/www.affero.org\/oagpl.html\" target=\"_blank\">Affero GPL<\/a>); the Gnu Project is history, philosophy, polemic and an embodiment of sheer will. Reading differently is what the (digital) humanities does.<\/p>\n<p>Further discussion is for the pub; this is just to suggest some suitable &#8211; and interesting! &#8211; reading around which to talk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the next Decoding Digital Humanities meeting, I&#8217;d like to propose reading two fundamental documents of the free software movement, Richard Stallman&#8217;s Gnu Project and the Gnu GPL (General Public License). These texts build on the last meeting&#8217;s reading of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/2010\/07\/two-gnus-the-gnu-project-and-the-gnu-gpl\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[46],"tags":[45,44],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-humanities","tag-free-software","tag-ucl-ddh"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137,"href":"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions\/137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anterotesis.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}