Mike Linksvayer | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Policy Director at GitHub |
| Known for | Technology Developer and Entrepreneur |
Mike Linksvayer is an intellectual freedom and commons proponent, known as a technology entrepreneur, developer and activist from co-founding Bitzi and leadership of Creative Commons. [1] [2] He is GitHub's Vice President of Policy.
Linksvayer holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has worked as a chief technical officer, vice president, manager, software developer and consultant. [3] He joined Creative Commons as CTO in April 2003, [3] and held that position until April 2007 when he became vice president. [4] He also co-founded p2p file sharing company Bitzi, well known for its invention of magnet links. [3]
Former executive director of Creative Commons, Glenn Otis Brown, noted that Mike Linksvayer brought much-needed stability to the organization, comparing his role to that of a drummer in a band. [5]
Linksvayer encouraged NASA to use public APIs to share its data, which is already in public domain as government works. He also suggested that scientists and other planetary societies use Creative Commons licenses to disseminate photos and other works so that the public has better access. [6]
Following his tenure as vice president, in April 2012 Linksvayer became a part-time Senior Fellow at Creative Commons. [1] Linksvayer also serves on the boards of OpenHatch [7] and Software Freedom Conservancy [8] [9] and chairs the Open Definition Advisory Council. [10]
Since 2015, Linksvayer has been GitHub's Director of Policy, addressing public policy issues. [11] [12]
Linksvayer speaks internationally and writes broadly. On January 30, 2015 he co-authored a whitepaper, "Towards a Design Space for a Commons Provenance System" with Tessa Askamp, Paul Keller, Catharina Maracke, and Maarten Zeinstra. [13]
In 2012, he wrote an essay in the essay collection, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, edited by David Bollier. [14] He contributed to Jono Bacon's O'Reilly book, The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation [15] and also wrote "Using and Sharing Data: the Black Letter, Fine Print, and Reality" for The Data Journalism Handbook. [16] In 2010 he co-authored with Aleksandar Erkalovic, Adam Hyde, Michael Mandiberg, Marta Peirano, Sissu Tarka, Astra Taylor, Alan Toner, and Mushon Zer-Aviv, Collaborative Futures using the novel Booksprint method of producing and releasing an entire book in a week. [17]
In 2009, Linksvayer contributed an essay "Free Culture in Relation to Software Freedom" to FSCONS Free Beer, edited by Stian Rødven Eide. [18]
In 2008, while at Creative Commons, Linksvayer co-authored a technical document with Ben Adida, Hal Abelson, and Nathan Yergler, "ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language." [19]
Mike Linksvayer is a vegan and follows a low-calorie diet. He was featured in a news story carried by a number of sources suggesting that calorie-restricted diets may extend life span. [20] He lives in Oakland, California. [21]
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
Bitzi was a website, operating from 2001 to 2013, where volunteers shared reports about any kind of digital file, with identifying metadata, commentary, and other ratings.
Jonathan Edward James Bacon is a writer and software engineer, originally from the United Kingdom, but now based in California. He works as a consultant on community strategy.
James Boyle is a Scottish intellectual property scholar. He is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina. He is most prominently known for advocating looser copyright policies in the United States and worldwide.
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.
Project DReaM was a Sun Microsystems project aimed at developing an open interoperable DRM architecture that implements standardized interfaces. Its primary goal was the creation of a royalty-free digital rights management industry standard. On 22 August 2005, Sun announced that it was opening up Project DReaM, which had started as an internal research project, as part of their Open Media Commons initiative. It was released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Due to inactivity on the project, it was closed and archived in August 2008. DReaM is an acronym that stands for "DRM everywhere/available".
Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.
License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.
Gandi SAS is a French company providing domain name registration, web hosting, and related services. The company's main office is in Paris.
Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content unrestricted by copyright and other legal limitations on use. These are works or expressions which can be freely studied, applied, copied and modified by anyone for any purpose including, in some cases, commercial purposes. Free content encompasses all works in the public domain and also those copyrighted works whose licenses honor and uphold the definition of free cultural work.
Smári McCarthy is an Icelandic-Irish politician, innovator and information activist known for his work relating to direct democracy, transparency and privacy.
The Definition of Free Cultural Works evaluates and recommends compatible free content licenses.
Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is an organization that provides a non-profit home, infrastructure support, and legal support for free and open source software projects. The organization was established in 2006, and as of June 2022, had over 40 member projects.
Homebrew is a free and open-source software package management system that simplifies the installation of software on Apple's operating system, macOS, as well as Linux. The name is intended to suggest the idea of building software on the Mac depending on the user's taste. Originally written by Max Howell, the package manager has gained popularity in the Ruby on Rails community and earned praise for its extensibility. Homebrew has been recommended for its ease of use as well as its integration into the command-line interface. Homebrew is a member of the Open Source Collective, and is run entirely by unpaid volunteers.
The Open Government Licence (OGL) is a copyright licence for Crown copyright works published by the UK government. Other UK public sector bodies may apply it to their publications. It was developed and is maintained by The National Archives. It is compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.
The Unlicense is a public domain equivalent license for software which provides a public domain waiver with a fall-back public-domain-like license, similar to the CC Zero for cultural works. It includes language used in earlier software projects and has a focus on an anti-copyright message.
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open source appropriate technology, and open source drug discovery.
Openverse is an open-source search engine for open content developed as part of the WordPress project. It searches Creative Commons licensed and public domain content from dozens of different sources. The software is licensed under the MIT License.
