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I think in that example the analogy might be more along the lines of studios who come down hard on fan fiction, forbidding it, versus those that allow it or eve

I think in that example the analogy might be more along the lines of studios who come down hard on fan fiction, forbidding it, versus those that allow it or even encourage or draw inspiration from it. Although my analogy falls short because even studios that don't allow fan fiction can't be as restrictive as most software, since everyone is still free to come up with fan fiction in the privacy of their own home. Not so with closed source software. Therein lies the fundamental difference with software: Movie intellectual property is all stuff that's right there, and the audience can see it. With software, the algorithms are often totally opaque to the user.

ineedasername 5y ago
I'm not so sure. Movie aren't all there to see. A vast majority of work to get movies to look & sound like they do happen behind the scenes, off the set, in editing rooms where color corrections, sound effects, cgi, and countless other tweaks are made. That's as much the source code equivalent as the final product. The final product is more like a picture of (some) source code and UI rolled into one.
- dwringer 5y ago
  Free software doesn't mean you get to see all the hard work that went into it, though, or that you get to see all the UML diagrams, or napkins, or other design documents. You might not even get all the supporting code, if it isn't required to build the software from the freely-released source (think about what kind of emacs configs developers might use in developing free software, but never release). That's not really what's at issue. Those things you mentioned behind the scenes of a film do not have ongoing side-effects on the audience. The hidden algorithms and obfuscated execution of non-free software do.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Well, to avoid stretching the metaphor too far, I'll just say that the movie/book/music equivalent of open source requires more than just the final product, which is essentially the compiled binary. Where you draw the line between between all production materials and the final output may vary. But if Avengers: Endgame was put under a permissive creative commons license, that would no more make it the equivalent of open source than if Microsoft allowed free distribution of MS Office & derivative works, but not the actual source code. At this point though we're debating the analogy more than the issue, not always productive (though sometimes it is). Maybe we've (I) stretched it too far.

ineedasername 5y ago

I'm not so sure. Movie aren't all there to see. A vast majority of work to get movies to look & sound like they do happen behind the scenes, off the set, in editing rooms where color corrections, sound effects, cgi, and countless other tweaks are made. That's as much the source code equivalent as the final product. The final product is more like a picture of (some) source code and UI rolled into one.

dwringer 5y ago
Free software doesn't mean you get to see all the hard work that went into it, though, or that you get to see all the UML diagrams, or napkins, or other design documents. You might not even get all the supporting code, if it isn't required to build the software from the freely-released source (think about what kind of emacs configs developers might use in developing free software, but never release). That's not really what's at issue. Those things you mentioned behind the scenes of a film do not have ongoing side-effects on the audience. The hidden algorithms and obfuscated execution of non-free software do.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Well, to avoid stretching the metaphor too far, I'll just say that the movie/book/music equivalent of open source requires more than just the final product, which is essentially the compiled binary. Where you draw the line between between all production materials and the final output may vary. But if Avengers: Endgame was put under a permissive creative commons license, that would no more make it the equivalent of open source than if Microsoft allowed free distribution of MS Office & derivative works, but not the actual source code. At this point though we're debating the analogy more than the issue, not always productive (though sometimes it is). Maybe we've (I) stretched it too far.