Community

What Open Creative Communities Tend To Forget About Free-Libre Licenses

A common is not owned by anyone, not even the community that is creating it.

Free licenses are here to protect the end users, not the authors. Copyright already over-protects the authors.

A good license for open creative communities is a license that aims to protect the users *from* the contributors, not to protect the contributors from the users.

Because, in the end, the one with all the power is the author.

By licensing work under a free-libre license, an author willingly chose to give a broad, permanent protection to the user against the author’s own rights.

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You'll have to explain how your community works again and again and again…

Never assume that people understand how your community is organized. Most of the time, from outside, they will see your community as a traditional organization.

(this post is adapted from the book Building an Open Community, chapter From Many to Massive.)

People tend to apply organizational patterns they have seen working before.

That’s why they will first try to find the hierarchy and the leaders in your community using a traditional approach.

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