History of Openfree
From Biolicense
1. The main concept of openfree is nothing new.
It has been perhaps the default protocol of any human/animal/biological/machine information property ever developed on Earth.
Animals learn how to acquire food and find new paths to destinations by observing other animals' behaviours.
Ancient people borrowed books and copied them to keep them for themselves (see Ancient Book Copyright). The contents' copy rights were implicitly transffered to the copiers. Or, there was no 'copyright' at all.
This particular openfree biolicense advocated by a group of people we call BioPeople started in the 1980s . This was directly and subconsciously from the broad tradition and culture of East Asia where book contents and information property was regarded as public and to be shared unless governments have strong regulation rules (such as knowledge on gunpower production in China and Korea). This was partly due to the high barrier of learning Chinese letters in ancient times. Anyone who could copy and learn difficult Chinese letters were usually welcome to the intellectual community although there were some class issues depending on the dynasties and kingdoms.
In 1990s, when the Internet became widely available, many software packages were pirated by poor students, poor nationals, media pirates, and other criminals.
Except the professional pirates and criminals, most piracy was for personal productivity, trials, or interest. This caused some people develop shareware, freeware, and opensource schemes to benefit both developers and the illegal users. Around this time, all over the world, some software developers, in IT field, who knew the value and works of software, proposed opensource and sharing copyrights. Famous examples are GNU and various shareware and freeware licenses.
2. Biologically Openfree
In the mid 1990s, in Cambridge, England, a group of bioinformatics experts maintained an open and sharing attitude toward using softwares. In general, biologists had sharing attitude toward various softwares and data from biophysics, genetics, bioinformatics, and genomics. This indirectly resulted in an openfree scheme for IPs in biology. Also, the term BioLicense was coined around this time. Freescience.net domain was set up (however, not much used) to support such an openfree principle in pursuing science.
Perhaps, the first successful major openfree and biolicense based product was BioPerl. It was followed by BioJava and a long list of BioXXX (Bio[.+)] projects. Unlike present GNU derived licenses, the first BioPerl's copyright was completely openfree. I.e., no copyrights and no writerights. Anyone who changed a single character in a datum or a source code could own the original material.
By late 1990s, many BioProjects had been proposed by many bioinformatists all over the world independently and as a connected mind network both consciously and unconsciously.
The relationship between openfree and biolicense.
BioLicense is openfree. An openfree sharing attitude and strategy resulted in BioLicense.
The reason why "openfree" and "BioLicense" are distinguishable from other sharing intellectual license is that it is based on the philosophy of bioism. All biological beings are regarded as information processing objects (acting subtects or units). Therefore, the copyright on any inoformation, knowledge and data can be a serious issue persisting in our information universe. It is a matter of our existence.
Therefore, openfree (and BioLicense) is about freeing such biological information processing existents as well as enhancing knowledge exchange for faster advancement/condensation of the biological information world or the biouniverse.
In the early 2000s, openfree and BioLicense schemes started having a more systematic internet domain network. This biodomain internet network is comprised of many Bio- domains such as Biomatics.org, biopedia.org, biosophy.org, Omics.org, and biofoundation.net.
In the mid 2000s, the people (biopeople) who advocate such openfree license are trying to suggest the ideas and expand the community for freer and more efficient world of knowledge sharing for future generation biological information processors (including men, animals and machines). As one of such efforts, the Biopeople held the first openfree BioWiki contest.
BioLicense is not a new concept and nothing special. It can be extreme to some people. It does not have many people advocating right now as perhaps the concept is not specific enough.
The future:
The concept of Openfree can be practically useful for many lay people when they want to utilize bioknowledge for education, research, and business. The core of Openfree is openning up everything and make everything free with full freedom.
The openfree BioLicense will be used for the BioBrain when humans and machines can communicate instantly in a gigantic information processing brain. BioLicense is, therefore, not only for humans but also for the future generations of biological objects, machines. It is designed for machines who want to share knowledge.
Is it different from Freeware and Public Domain?
Yes, it is different. It does not advocate the 'creation' of any knowledge by one or a small number of 'original' 'founders'. There is no founder who is original and creative under BioLicense.
* The Write rights and Copy rights
Openfree usually means there is no "copy" right imposed by the authors and contributors. However, BioLicense is an extreme case of NO write right.
In other words, the authors do not maintain their 'write' right or intellectual properties and give away the so-called originality and contribution to the world free of charge. It is under the philosophy that no human intellectual product is actually "created" and originated by one person. BioLicense implies that all the human knowledge processes are the results of mutual copying, sharing, adding, modifying, and synthesizing existing words, meanings and concepts under deterministic rules of the universe called "biogrid".
No rights are reserved and BioLicense enables any information object to do anything to any intellectual properties under it.
Biolicense does not regard data, information, and knowledge as a conventional property.
BioOriginality Biojustice.org | Biopedia.org | Biosites.org | Biosophy.org | FreeScience.net
