Of Kangs and Copyrights

I've spent a lot of time on the Internet, pretty much from 1997 when the first UK ISP started allowing dialup membership for free via a 0800 number. In that time i've seen a lot of changes in the way that the internet has been shaped by people, companies, governments and the law, some for the good of everyone and some for the bad. Although it carries on regardless, people are always finding new ways to be creative and get around the barriers that are put in place by others. For example, not so long a go the UK forced ISP's to censorship access to 'The Pirate Bay' because they said it hosted nothing but illegal files and allowing it to UK citizens was wrong and unlawful and needed to be stopped. Before it has even been blocked, third parties had already put up proxies to allow anyone who really wanted to access the site before and after the blocking rule had been forced down our throats.

So why should anyone care about freedom to access, use files and information? Because it's your right in this demographic world to be able to have freedom of information, freedom to create and freedom to access what you like as long as it doesn't destroy children or kill anyone. So imagine what happened recently in my time on the XDA forums when I started seeing people being stifled from higher powers about being able to use people's work in their own mods/roms. It got me thinking that once again this is someone else trying to limit/snuff out people from being creative with an open source platform. After all, Android is open source, always will be open source as long as there is a Google on this earth. People under the GNU License are able to take others work and use it for their own, free of charge, without penalty. So why are people having their work, threads and accounts wiped/banned from XDA.

This is not fair, it's not right and it is in my opinion straying completely from the whole idea of what open source really is. The only rule I believe in is 'crediting' which means that if you use someone else's mod or work in your creation then they should be credited for that work, either in a readme, website, blog, thread, etc.. As long as it's credited, the original owner should have no reason to kick up a fuss or demand their work be removed.

"Open source is open source, either go by the GNU rules or don't create anything under it."

This blog post was inspired by the following XDA thread by DutchDanny: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=27659223 and he has my support. Retweet this blog post, kang my words, you have the right under the freedom of information and my words are 'open source' for all