Community

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.

(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.