Leaning against a tree.
Karl Fogel

I usually work on Free things. "Free" doesn't just mean zero cost; it means the freedom to copy, to share, to modify and redistribute without arbitrary restrictions. For more details, see this article on the surprising history of copyright and the promise of a post-copyright world. Share the article with anyone — it's Free.

Are you having trouble sending me email? If I failed to respond to your message, it may be that it simply got lost in all the spam (or, perhaps, that my spam filters accidentally ate it). Click here to find out how to send me a message that will get through my spam filters and be noticed.

Work

I work with O'Reilly Media as an Open Civics Development Specialist, trying to find ways in which some of the dynamics of open source software development to can be brought to government projects.

Non-profit: I work with QuestionCopyright.org, a California-based non-profit that promotes public understanding of the history and effects of copyright, and encourages the development of distribution systems suitable for a networked world in which the cost of sharing information has gone to zero.
Writings
Open Source Projects

(For detailed open source activity, see my account at the aggregator ohloh.net.)

There is no blueprint for this Web site, but the overall plan is best described by this wonderful quote from architect Eliel Saarinen:

"There must always be an end in view, and the end must not be final."

He was applying that principle to architecture, but it's also the perfect philosophy for arranging a Web site... or an Internet.

I often program computers (but please don't ask me if I can help you with your computer, because I probably can't). Like many programmers, I have serious reservations about Microsoft, and in this essay published at Slashdot, I tried to set down in writing the reasons why.

What's so great about the Internet? Thomas Jefferson said it best in this 1813 letter to Isaac MacPherson:

"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."

Now you've almost reached the end of the page, and I'm running out of novelties. In a desperate attempt to change the subject, may I suggest you visit the Golosá web site, where is to be found excellent Russian choral music, both folk and liturgical? Or check out the web pages of some friends: Ben Collins Sussman (who has a most unusual receipt, but then so does Kate), Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Pilato, Jim Blandy, or Noel Cragg.

Email: kfogel@red-bean.com.

(You can send me GNUPG-encrypted messages using my public key.)