People aren't supporting Moon Plan

> Intellectual property rights are a reason to do everything associated
> with space as volunteerism. Imagine a scenario where a space colonist
> is looking at a piece of broken equipment made by a paid contractor.
> His laptop has a blank for information on the internals of this black
> box. The contractor used unreleased proprietary information to develop
> this box many years before it broke. The company is now out of
> business. What does our colonist do? Open source implies volunteer
> effort. Closed source implies commercial companies. As a colonist
> which do you want?

Wow! What a good point! (I may use this somehow!)

By the way, NASA has had similar problems. I don't know the current
status, but at one SSI conference someone from NASA told me NASA was
having troubling building a 3D model of (IIRC) the shuttle docking with
the ISS, because when the contracts were written NASA only got rights to
the blueprints, not the original CAD models, which the contractors
claimed remained theirs. Our tax dollars at work. I wonder if as an
institution they have learned from this lesson. NASA should require IMHO
all contractors to make everything reasonable related to the work
process public domain or freely licensed.

--Paul Fernhout