The Futuof the National Space Society

>>In any case, a free library of manufacturing knowledge is a way for
>>organizations with different roadmaps for human development (Mars, SPS,
>>Moon, Habitats, BFI/Earth) to collaborate in creating such a free
>>library because they can all draw from the free information for their
>>specific projects. However, to date, organizations, including SSI,
>>attempt to keep their work proprietary so they can control it tightly
>>and make money off of it to fund other paid efforts. The internet
>>mediated volunteer development approach modeled after GNU/Linux and the
>>free software movement is a way forward IMHO.
>
> You could use the public license approach also without waiving the
> license fee, so if SSI wanted to make money of their "not for profit
> business" they could but they were not able to stop progress through
> closing out competitive development basing on their patents.
>
> Many inventors who are not inclined to give their inventions away for
> free may be willing to use such an open license approach.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I think there are a couple of broad issues here.

One is that technology protected for a short time by a patent could
still be in the database of technological designs -- but perhaps not
used in an actual physical implementation without royalties. (I worry
about whether people might claim patents prevent using the techology
idea in simulation -- perhaps a grey legal area?)

In the context of such a project, I don't have that much of a problem
with hardware patents related to space technology -- in twenty years (a
likely timeframe for projects to happen in) today's patents will all be
expired (software patents are a different issue). I have more of an
issue with copyrights, which are now effectively perpetual (they keep
getting extended) and cover more and more aspects of a work than just
the specific tangible form of it. And trademarks are yet another thing
to be controlled or not. Obviously this is a complex issue, see for example:
http://www.deoxy.org/ipmyths.htm
taken from:
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/

The other broad issue is the notion of motivating volunteers to
cooperate to design the blueprints of technical artifacts, where the
blueprints and related assembly instructions etc. are copyrighted and
sold in some way by some organization exclusively. I don't see that idea
moving forward emotionally or politically if an organization tries to
get volunteers to make such blueprints and then claim ownership over
them by the organization. SSI already had some issues with such an
attempt stalling (the Matrix project) for lack of enough volunteers and
publicity -- it's very hard work to keep such a system up to date even
using volunteers (as Mark Prado of the excellent PERMANENT site
www.permanent.com/
will attest to :-). Proprietary works will generally get much less
publicity, and non-profits rarely have funds to advertise.

In general, volunteers can never trust an organization (even a
"non-profit") not to sell out and then shelve all their donated work --
without clear and binding licenses or other contractual statments. I
think the non-profit / for-profit distinction won't help that much in
this regard. Realistically, I think the only proposal that will fly long
term with volunteers is similar to current free software and open source
models -- that their end product is made freely available either in the
public domain or under some GPL-like license. More details are in the
2001 SSI paper I presented
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html

For the most part, I think we are past a "build it and they will come"
time for internet sites. One can be built easily enough (although long
term peer-to-peer is the way to go for various technical and legal
reasons), but such an effort needs to be pointed at and promoted by a
group like the NSS as well as others if it is to take off.

--Paul Fernhout