As I recently wrote the obvious, “licensing is legal, and legal things are complex”. I should have wrote, licensing is the suck!

When ever I start thinking about licensing and it being the suck, I think to Lawrence Lessig‘s keynote presentation at the annual Open Source Convention (OSCON) made on July 24, 2002. My favorite parts are:

• Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
• The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
• Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
• Ours is less and less a free society.

O’Reilly Network — Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002

I highly recommend reading, hearing, or viewing the whole talk about a lot more than licensing that Lessig has given more than 100 times. It speaks to why licensing is the suck and presents some of the largest issues facing civilization today.