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> One piece of advice that I think is actually quite bad, or at least I've had extremely bad experiences with, is asking people for something. I've often cold-e

> One piece of advice that I think is actually quite bad, or at least I've had extremely bad experiences with, is asking people for something. I've often cold-emailed artists, programmers and other hobbyists asking them to make their work libre/free (artists CC-BY/CC-BY-SA/CC0, programmers GPL, hobbyists some type of OSH or CERN license) and I don't think I've ever gotten a positive response. In case you’re interested in constructive feedback, what you’re doing here sounds more like advocating for someone to provide some social good, but couching it in passive language. With you not knowing these people, the ask itself is extremely presumptuous and the approach you describe of using passive language likely lands on them as a passive aggressive maneuver. Many people find that that approach to be manipulative and offensive. If you’d just like personal use for free, you should ask for that directly and maybe share why that would be helpful for you, so that they can approach it as an act of sympathy or charity. If you are invested in the principles of free/libre works, then you should advocate for that directly explain why the principle is so important to you that you’d engage with a stranger about it. In both cases, you’re still likely to get a lot of closed doors and hostile responses, but you would at least be doing these people the kindness of being direct about what you want and why you want it.

abetusk 4y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I suspected as much in terms of the passive language being perceived as passive aggressive. I didn't want to come off as aggressive as most of the time I really like the person or their work and I certainly don't want to strong arm them into doing something they don't want to do. I think your advice is good to try and personalize the story and be direct about it. I don't have any illusions that this will be successful but at least it won't fail in the same way. That being said, I can imagine an organization that promotes libre/free work making a blanket email that does just that (I've even read a few myself). The reason is clear because it's the organizations mission and, in that context, direct language would be preferred. Food for though. I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  > I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work. You’d up the odds a lot if you offered to pay them to relicense the work. It would say a lot that you’re willing to invest in these principles you care about, and would make it easier for them to quantify the change to what they likely see as an asset portfolio. What’s currently a charitable plea becomes a philanthropic negotiation.
  - abetusk 4y ago
    In some cases I've offered to pay with the same outcome. Sometimes the offer to pay came after the initial email, other times it was in the form of cryptocurrency and others, I'm pretty sure, it was offered initially but, regardless, all of these cases might have had the framing of the offer poison the interaction from the outset. My next experiment is to frame it in terms of a purely business transaction with the condition that the work released under a libre/free license, making sure not to use any of the passive language I've used before, etc. The issue is always understanding what a fair price is and, for my own personal standards, make sure the artist understands what kind of terms they're agreeing to (the equivalent of "informed consent").
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  > Food for though. I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work. You start by getting them to license the work to you. Unless the person you're asking is a software developer, of course, their first reaction probably isn't going to be quite as "free" as the licenses we're used to around here, but plenty of artists are perfectly willing to grant informal licenses, especially if scoped to some project you have in mind. (This should go without saying, but this is an SV startup-centered community, so maybe it needs to be specified, but you should not abuse the informality of such terms if you want to convince people any further.) Then you probe to license their work to other people who aren't you but might be like you in wanting to prepare derivatives of the work, except that they might not have had the temerity to ask. You should realize that this is a much taller ask, especially outside software circles, because people have intuitions about the integrity of their work that public licenses are expressly designed to waive. At some point in the process you might consider offering to pay for the equivalent of retroactively commissioning the piece to relicense it! This frames what you want as a slightly-twisted variation on a relationship artists in particular are relatively well-equipped to deal with, and usually comes with an understanding of what the buyer can do with the output— "How much would you charge to commission a work to be used for any purpose with unlimited distribution?"
naniwaduni 4y ago
> In case you’re interested in constructive feedback, what you’re doing here sounds more like advocating for someone to provide some social good, but couching it in passive language. To add to this, artists have lots of experience with people asking for free stuff and couching it in "social good" language. In their experience, these people are invariably assholes, and they don't want to deal with you long enough to find out that you are one too.

abetusk 4y ago

Thanks for the feedback. I suspected as much in terms of the passive language being perceived as passive aggressive. I didn't want to come off as aggressive as most of the time I really like the person or their work and I certainly don't want to strong arm them into doing something they don't want to do. I think your advice is good to try and personalize the story and be direct about it. I don't have any illusions that this will be successful but at least it won't fail in the same way. That being said, I can imagine an organization that promotes libre/free work making a blanket email that does just that (I've even read a few myself). The reason is clear because it's the organizations mission and, in that context, direct language would be preferred. Food for though. I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work.

swatcoder 4y ago
> I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work. You’d up the odds a lot if you offered to pay them to relicense the work. It would say a lot that you’re willing to invest in these principles you care about, and would make it easier for them to quantify the change to what they likely see as an asset portfolio. What’s currently a charitable plea becomes a philanthropic negotiation.
- abetusk 4y ago
  In some cases I've offered to pay with the same outcome. Sometimes the offer to pay came after the initial email, other times it was in the form of cryptocurrency and others, I'm pretty sure, it was offered initially but, regardless, all of these cases might have had the framing of the offer poison the interaction from the outset. My next experiment is to frame it in terms of a purely business transaction with the condition that the work released under a libre/free license, making sure not to use any of the passive language I've used before, etc. The issue is always understanding what a fair price is and, for my own personal standards, make sure the artist understands what kind of terms they're agreeing to (the equivalent of "informed consent").
naniwaduni 4y ago
> Food for though. I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work. You start by getting them to license the work to you. Unless the person you're asking is a software developer, of course, their first reaction probably isn't going to be quite as "free" as the licenses we're used to around here, but plenty of artists are perfectly willing to grant informal licenses, especially if scoped to some project you have in mind. (This should go without saying, but this is an SV startup-centered community, so maybe it needs to be specified, but you should not abuse the informality of such terms if you want to convince people any further.) Then you probe to license their work to other people who aren't you but might be like you in wanting to prepare derivatives of the work, except that they might not have had the temerity to ask. You should realize that this is a much taller ask, especially outside software circles, because people have intuitions about the integrity of their work that public licenses are expressly designed to waive. At some point in the process you might consider offering to pay for the equivalent of retroactively commissioning the piece to relicense it! This frames what you want as a slightly-twisted variation on a relationship artists in particular are relatively well-equipped to deal with, and usually comes with an understanding of what the buyer can do with the output— "How much would you charge to commission a work to be used for any purpose with unlimited distribution?"

naniwaduni 4y ago

> In case you’re interested in constructive feedback, what you’re doing here sounds more like advocating for someone to provide some social good, but couching it in passive language. To add to this, artists have lots of experience with people asking for free stuff and couching it in "social good" language. In their experience, these people are invariably assholes, and they don't want to deal with you long enough to find out that you are one too.