week 7 Lecture

The lecturer of this week lecture is adam as well, and this week we was talk about free culture and free society which means creative commons free and open source software. This is first time I heard free software which you can made it by yourself. The software in Australia is quite expensive, because I bought mac word last month, which coast me nearly 200 dollars. However, people normally download those kind of softwares in China and it is legal.

First of all, we've talked about free culture. I wrote down this sentence which from Lawrence Lessing (2004) in my note book, he point out that our current culture is one in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past. Secondly, we moved on to the definition of creativecommons.org. It stared in 2003, the teacher showed the video to us in the lecture that make us to understand it more deeply. The main point of this organization is that it want people work together and shared culture. In addition, it is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting reasonable copyright. The idea that we can voluntarily relax out copyrights in the interests of sharing comes from the free software movement.

Then, the teacher discussed about free open source software. Richard M Stallman stared this project in 1981. He attend to create a completely free Unix-like software. Actually, it is easy to make software works, people need to change the source code. Source code is instructions written in programming languages that tell a computer to do certain things. You can use source code make your favorite software. Last but not least, open source may get in to business world. I did not catch this part very well. I think I need to research more information about this part.

Using free software is big challenge for me, because all of them are English. I probably will have a try someday.