Week 7 Lecture 1/2

I'm going to keep my deviations out of the way for this blog, mostly because I have a lot of personal examples when it comes to creative commons and open source (or at the very least, the idea of it) and it would be better for the second post rather than this.

For once I have nothing negative to say about today’s topic, wait no I lied I do have some negative things to say. I like open source software and use quite a lot of it, in fact I'm using Firefox to write this up in right now, and will probably use Open Office to spell check it. I'm a cheap-ass uni student so I love free stuff and will take it up where ever I can. But open source has its problems; I personally can't stand the gimp and refuse to use it over Photoshop. I've tried to use Linux quite a few times but I'm neither a programmer nor desire to be one so it doesn't come very easy to me to rely on a command prompt. I've tried the graphical interface versions (whose name I cannot remember, it was quite good and took me six hours to download) but it felt like being in a post apocalyptic waste land where you have to dig through garbage to do simple tasks that you take for granted when using Windows. In my case it was the fact it refused to bloody install my graphics card driver. And when it installed it decided that the card didn't actually exist, but I can blame Nvidia for that.

But away from my personal shortcomings towards with unknown technologies, creative commons is great, but I don't like it when a pretentious tag comes along for the ride with it. I would hate myself to call Trent Reznor pretentious, although it would not be too far from the truth, when people start jumping up and down and start feeling they're superior because of this sort of thing it's a good case of "god damn it get over yourself". Same could be said with Mac users. There! I said it! But that's more the case of being delusional than anything else.

That aside, creative commons serves as a great benefit to not just the internet but to society as a whole. The less we care about people stealing our stuff the more we start to benefit culturally. Over excess of red tape ruins the world.