The casual view of open source software is that the code always comes first: releases are made when the code is ready, new contributors prove their chops by the quality of their code, and so forth.

This new book "Open Advice" is the answer to "What would you have liked to know when you started contributing?". 42 prominent free and open source software contributors give insights into the many different talents it takes to make a successful software project, coding of course but also design, translation, marketing and other skills. They are here to give you a head start if you are new.

" It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not arise by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it.

"Google have launched MapMaker, a kind of faux OpenStreetMap where they own all the data and you’re only allowed to map in certain Freedom Of Speech Zones [...] The terms of use are hilarious - the bottom line seems to be that Google ends up owning excusively the entire aggregate work, but it is your fault if anything goes wrong [...] If you contribute to Google MapMaker, you are contributing to

Pretending that ownership of software is possible and thus trying to enforce this ownership (as copyright and patent laws do) actually leads us to violations of actual physical property.

Does contributing your code to some FOSS project automatically give away your copyright on that code?

"Web 2.0 companies are largely built upon Open Source software. But how many of them do you consider significant contributors to Open Source? [...]and with the focus on APIs, instead of contributing code back to the projects you leverage, or contributing your own projects, cooperation has been limited..."

Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of “three stories and an argument.” The Net’s most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the “ASCAP cartel” to build a case for creative freedom.

Since 1989, the USTR has used the Special 301 Report to intimidate other countries into adopting more stringent copyright and patent laws by singling out particular countries for their "bad" intellectual property policies, naming them on a tiered set of "watch lists,"