Following up on previous Boing Boing posts (1, 2 3, 4) about remarks by Bill Gates comparing free culture advocates to commies — a number of readers picked up the meme and riffed on their own. Here are a few of the many “creative commonist” propaganda submissions received in recent days:
Robert Corr website buttons (thanks, Tama), Kill Sapo‘s printable graphics, Andrew Mike‘s Internationale lyrics remixed, a “creative commies blog, Eugéne Roux’s desktop graphic shown here — link to fullsize (“My modifications to the original XP background are, of course, Creative Commons licenced” he says).
Boing Boing reader Dylan Herbert says,
“This is an article posted on OSNews last August. It addresses concerns the author of the piece – David Adams, the man behind the launch of OSNews in 1997 – has with what he labels (and I paraphrase here) the internet-wide ‘open-source = communist’ meme. It is a brilliant, 9-page essay in which he explores ‘why this idea is wrong and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.’
While Adams does not ‘deny that some proponents of free software do, in fact, share some ideological common ground with Communist thinkers,’ he clearly lays out the stark differences between them.”
Link.
Wired News also covered the blogosphere brouhaha over Redmond’s red scare. Snip:
Glenn Otis Brown, executive director of Creative Commons, wondered whom Gates was referring to when he made the remarks. Certainly not Creative Commons, which is a “voluntary, market-based approach to copyright,” Brown wrote in an e-mail.
“I get sad when people cheapen words like ‘communist’ or ‘fascist’ by throwing them around recklessly, especially given what those words meant in the not-so-distant past,” Brown wrote. “My father was a CIA Cold Warrior for 35 years of his life; he wasn’t fighting against GPL’d software. Stalinist purges, the Berlin Wall, tanks in Budapest — that’s communism.
“And let’s not forget just how many creative people’s lives were ruined by irresponsible name-calling not too long ago. Remember the Hollywood blacklists?” he wrote.
See also this item on Dan Gillmor’s blog about Gates’ remarks, and this subsequent post.