www/philosophy funding-art-vs-funding-software....

[Robert Musial]

CVSROOT:        /web/www
Module name:    www
Changes by:     Robert Musial <musial>  13/01/30 23:19:01

Modified files:
        philosophy     : funding-art-vs-funding-software.html 

Log message:
        added formatting and link to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

CVSWeb URLs:
http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/www/philosophy/funding-art-vs-funding-software.html?cvsroot=www&r1=1.1&r2=1.2

Patches:
Index: funding-art-vs-funding-software.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /web/www/www/philosophy/funding-art-vs-funding-software.html,v
retrieving revision 1.1
retrieving revision 1.2
diff -u -b -r1.1 -r1.2
--- funding-art-vs-funding-software.html        30 Jan 2013 23:11:05 -0000      
1.1
+++ funding-art-vs-funding-software.html        30 Jan 2013 23:19:00 -0000      
1.2
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@
 Stallman</strong></a></p>
 
 
-I've proposed two new systems to fund artists in a world where we have
+<p>I've proposed two new systems to fund artists in a world where we have
 legalized sharing (noncommercial redistribution of exact copies) of
 published works. One is for the state to collect taxes for the
 purpose, and divide the money among artists in proportion to the cube
@@ -17,61 +17,61 @@
 of the population). The other is for each player to have a "donate"
 button to anonymously send a small sum (perhaps 50 cents, in the US)
 to the artists who made the last work played. These funds would go to
-artists, not to their publishers.
+artists, not to their publishers.</p>
 
-People often wonder why I don't propose these methods for free
+<p>People often wonder why I don't propose these methods for free
 software. There's a reason for that: it is hard to adapt them to
-works that are free.
+works that are free.</p>
 
-In my view, works designed to be used to do practical jobs must be
+<p>In my view, works designed to be used to do practical jobs must be
 free. The people who use them deserve to have control over the jobs
 they do, which requires control over the works they use to do them,
 which requires the four freedoms (see
-http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). Works to do practical
+<a 
href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html";>http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html</a>).
 Works to do practical
 jobs include educational resources, reference works, recipes, text
-fonts and, of course, software; these works must be free.
+fonts and, of course, software; these works must be free.</p>
 
-That argument does not apply to works of opinion (such as this one) or
+<p>That argument does not apply to works of opinion (such as this one) or
 art, because they are not designed for the users to do practical jobs
 with. Thus, I don't believe those works must be free. We must
 legalize sharing them, and using pieces in remix to make totally
 different new works, but that doesn't include in publishing modified
 versions of them. It follows that, for these works, we can tell who
 the authors are. Each published work can specify who its authors are,
-and changing that information can be illegal.
+and changing that information can be illegal.</p>
 
-That crucial point enables my proposed funding systems to work. It
+<p>That crucial point enables my proposed funding systems to work. It
 means that if you play a song and push the "donate" button, the system
 can be sure who should get your donation. Likewise, if you
 participate in the survey that calculates popularities, the system
 will know who to credit with a little more popularity because you
-listened to that song or made a copy of it.
+listened to that song or made a copy of it.</p>
 
-When one song is made by multiple artists (for instance, several
+<p>When one song is made by multiple artists (for instance, several
 musicians and a songwriter), that doesn't happen by accident. They
 know they are working together, and they can decide in advance how to
 divide up the popularity that song later develops &mdash; or use the
 standard default rules for this division. This case creates no
 problem for those two funding proposals because the work, once made,
-is not changed by others.
+is not changed by others.</p>
 
-However, in a field of free works, one large work can have hundreds,
+<p>However, in a field of free works, one large work can have hundreds,
 even thousands of authors. There can be various versions with
 different, overlapping sets of authors. Moreover, the contributions
 of those authors will differ in kind as well as in magnitude. This
 makes it impossible to divide the work's popularity among the
 contributors in a way that can be justified as correct. It's not just
 hard work; it's not merely complex. The problem raises philosophical
-questions that have no good answers.
+questions that have no good answers.</p>
 
-Consider, for example, the free program GNU Emacs. Our records of
+<p>Consider, for example, the free program GNU Emacs. Our records of
 contributions to the code of GNU Emacs are incomplete in the period
 before we started using version control -- before that we have only
 the change logs. But let's imagine we still had every version and
 could determine precisely what code contribution is due to each of
-the hundreds of contributors. We'd still be stuck.
+the hundreds of contributors. We'd still be stuck.</p>
 
-If we wanted to give credit in proportion to lines of code (or should
+<p>If we wanted to give credit in proportion to lines of code (or should
 it be characters?), then it would be straightforward, once we decide
 how to handle a line that was written by A and then changed by B. But
 that assumes each line as important as every other line. I am sure
@@ -83,41 +83,41 @@
 certain others might deserve additional credit for having initially
 written certain later important additions, but I see no objective way
 to decide how much. I can't propose a justifiable rule for dividing
-up the popularity credit of a program like GNU Emacs.
+up the popularity credit of a program like GNU Emacs.</p>
 
-As for asking all the contributors to negotiate an agreement, we can't
+<p>As for asking all the contributors to negotiate an agreement, we can't
 even try. There have been hundreds of contributors, and we could not
 find them all today. They contributed across a span of 26 years, and
-never at any time did all those people decide to work together.
+never at any time did all those people decide to work together.</p>
 
-We might not even know the names of all the authors. If some code was
+<p>We might not even know the names of all the authors. If some code was
 donated by companies, we did not need to ask which persons wrote that
-code.
+code.</p>
 
-Then what about the forked or modified variants of GNU Emacs? Each
+<p>Then what about the forked or modified variants of GNU Emacs? Each
 one is an additional case, equally complex but different. How much of
 the credit for such a variant should go to those who worked on that
 variant, and how much to the original authors of the code they got
-from other GNU Emacs versions, other programs, and so on?
+from other GNU Emacs versions, other programs, and so on?</p>
 
-The conclusion is that there is no way we could come up with a
+<p>The conclusion is that there is no way we could come up with a
 division of the credit for GNU Emacs and justify it as anything but
 arbitrary. But Emacs is not a special case; it is a typical example.
 The same problems would arise for many important free programs, and
-other free works such as Wikipedia pages.
+other free works such as Wikipedia pages.</p>
 
-These problems are the reasons I don't propose using those two funding
+<p>These problems are the reasons I don't propose using those two funding
 systems in fields such as software, encyclopedias or education, were
-all works ought to be free.
+all works ought to be free.</p>
 
-What makes sense for these areas is to ask people to donate to
+<p>What makes sense for these areas is to ask people to donate to
 <em>projects</em> for the work <em>they propose to do</em>. That
-system is simple.
+system is simple.</p>
 
-The Free Software Foundation asks for donations in two ways. We ask
+<p>The Free Software Foundation asks for donations in two ways. We ask
 for general donations to support the foundation's work, and we invite
 targeted donations for certain specific projects. Other free software
-organizations do this too.
+organizations do this too.</p>
 
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@@ -156,7 +156,7 @@
 <p>
 Updated:
 <!-- timestamp start -->
-$Date: 2013/01/30 23:11:05 $
+$Date: 2013/01/30 23:19:00 $
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 </p>
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