Week 7 - Lecture

Once again we had Adam which I really enjoyed. His lecture topics are really interesting to me. This weeks topic was all about sharing knowledge and building on previous works or ideas. Before the advent of Lawyers and capitalism knowledge was freely distributed in the community and available for anyone to use, expand on and even change. At the moment the norm is to keep control of all the content you create and protect it from use by others.

While I see the point to this kind of protection, the concept that we were introduced to this week of 'creative commons' is a great compliment to the existing copyright laws. Creative Commons is another type of copyright, just a more relaxed version. Instead of the creator retaining all rights over a piece they can choose how much of their rights they wish to release; allowing it to be used by other creators to use to make their own works, or to build on the original.

Adam also talked about open source software and asked us to look into some and try to use one for a week and judge if it better or worse. This is an area that I have been getting more and more familiar with. I love my iMac and adobe programs and doubt that I'll ever change from that, especially with the industry focus on these. However I do already use open source programs on my laptop. The ones I use most are Firefox and Openoffice.

Firefox is a free web browser, I use it because I find it to run smoother with less glitches then explorer and I refuse to use chrome out of principle because of Google. OpenOffice is a free word processor, very similar to Microsoft's version but you don't have to empty your wallet every time there is an new version update. I like Openoffice awesome, I can do everything Word or iWork does; while it's not as refined it does get the job done.

In my research of this topic I found a blog by a Turkish designer which made me laugh. Its opening is kind of relevant to this topic. Check it out; click here; plus there are a few other posts on there that are very good.