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+<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.84 -->
+<title>Funding Art vs Funding Software
+- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
+<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/funding-art-vs-funding-software.translist" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+
+<h2>Funding Art vs Funding Software</h2>
+
+<p>by <a href="http://www.stallman.org/"><strong>Richard
+Stallman</strong></a></p>
+
+<p>I've proposed two new systems to fund artists in a world where we have
+legalized sharing (noncommercial redistribution of exact copies) of
+published works. One is for the state to collect taxes for the
+purpose, and divide the money among artists in proportion to the cube
+root of the popularity of each one (as measured by surveying samples
+of the population). The other is for each player to have a
+&ldquo;donate&rdquo; button to anonymously send a small sum (perhaps
+50 cents, in the US) to the artists who made the last work played.
+These funds would go to artists, not to their publishers.</p>
+
+<p>People often wonder why I don't propose these methods for free
+software. There's a reason for that: it is hard to adapt them to
+works that are free.</p>
+
+<p>In my view, works designed to be used to do practical jobs must be
+free. The people who use them deserve to have control over the jobs
+they do, which requires control over the works they use to do them,
+which requires the four freedoms (see <a
+href="/philosophy/free-sw.html">
+http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html</a>). Works to do practical
+jobs include educational resources, reference works, recipes, text
+fonts and, of course, software; these works must be free.</p>
+
+<p>That argument does not apply to works of opinion (such as this one) or
+art, because they are not designed for the users to do practical jobs
+with. Thus, I don't believe those works must be free. We must
+legalize sharing them, and using pieces in remix to make totally
+different new works, but that doesn't include in publishing modified
+versions of them. It follows that, for these works, we can tell who
+the authors are. Each published work can specify who its authors are,
+and changing that information can be illegal.</p>
+
+<p>That crucial point enables my proposed funding systems to work. It
+means that if you play a song and push the &ldquo;donate&rdquo;
+button, the system can be sure who should get your donation. Likewise,
+if you participate in the survey that calculates popularities, the
+system will know who to credit with a little more popularity because
+you listened to that song or made a copy of it.</p>
+
+<p>When one song is made by multiple artists (for instance, several
+musicians and a songwriter), that doesn't happen by accident. They
+know they are working together, and they can decide in advance how to
+divide up the popularity that song later develops&mdash;or use the
+standard default rules for this division. This case creates no
+problem for those two funding proposals because the work, once made,
+is not changed by others.</p>
+
+<p>However, in a field of free works, one large work can have hundreds,
+even thousands of authors. There can be various versions with
+different, overlapping sets of authors. Moreover, the contributions
+of those authors will differ in kind as well as in magnitude. This
+makes it impossible to divide the work's popularity among the
+contributors in a way that can be justified as correct. It's not just
+hard work; it's not merely complex. The problem raises philosophical
+questions that have no good answers.</p>
+
+<p>Consider, for example, the free program GNU Emacs. Our records of
+contributions to the code of GNU Emacs are incomplete in the period
+before we started using version control&mdash;before that we have only
+the change logs. But let's imagine we still had every version and
+could determine precisely what code contribution is due to each of
+the hundreds of contributors. We'd still be stuck.</p>
+
+<p>If we wanted to give credit in proportion to lines of code (or should
+it be characters?), then it would be straightforward, once we decide
+how to handle a line that was written by A and then changed by B. But
+that assumes each line as important as every other line. I am sure
+that is wrong&mdash;some pieces of the code do more important jobs
+and others less; some code is harder to write and other code is
+easier. But I see no way to quantify these distinctions, and the
+developers could argue about them forever. I might deserve some
+additional credit for having initially written the program, and
+certain others might deserve additional credit for having initially
+written certain later important additions, but I see no objective way
+to decide how much. I can't propose a justifiable rule for dividing
+up the popularity credit of a program like GNU Emacs.</p>
+
+<p>As for asking all the contributors to negotiate an agreement, we can't
+even try. There have been hundreds of contributors, and we could not
+find them all today. They contributed across a span of 26 years, and
+never at any time did all those people decide to work together.</p>
+
+<p>We might not even know the names of all the authors. If some code was
+donated by companies, we did not need to ask which persons wrote that
+code.</p>
+
+<p>Then what about the forked or modified variants of GNU Emacs? Each
+one is an additional case, equally complex but different. How much of
+the credit for such a variant should go to those who worked on that
+variant, and how much to the original authors of the code they got
+from other GNU Emacs versions, other programs, and so on?</p>
+
+<p>The conclusion is that there is no way we could come up with a
+division of the credit for GNU Emacs and justify it as anything but
+arbitrary. But Emacs is not a special case; it is a typical example.
+The same problems would arise for many important free programs, and
+other free works such as Wikipedia pages.</p>
+
+<p>These problems are the reasons I don't propose using those two funding
+systems in fields such as software, encyclopedias or education, where
+all works ought to be free.</p>
+
+<p>What makes sense for these areas is to ask people to donate to
+<em>projects</em> for the work <em>they propose to do</em>. That
+system is simple.</p>
+
+<p>The Free Software Foundation asks for donations in two ways. We
+ask for <a href="https://my.fsf.org/donate/"> general donations to
+support the foundation's work</a>, and we invite <a
+href="https://my.fsf.org/donate/directed-donations"> targeted
+donations for certain specific projects</a>. Other free software
+organizations do this too.</p>
+
+</div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
+<div id="footer">
+<div class="unprintable">
+
+<p>Please send general FSF &amp; GNU inquiries to
+<a href="mailto:gnu@gnu.org">&lt;gnu@gnu.org&gt;</a>.
+There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a>
+the FSF. Broken links and other corrections or suggestions can be sent
+to <a href="mailto:webmasters@gnu.org">&lt;webmasters@gnu.org&gt;</a>.</p>
+
+<p><!-- TRANSLATORS: Ignore the original text in this paragraph,
+ replace it with the translation of these two:
+
+ We work hard and do our best to provide accurate, good quality
+ translations. However, we are not exempt from imperfection.
+ Please send your comments and general suggestions in this regard
+ to <a href="mailto:web-translators@gnu.org">
+ &lt;web-translators@gnu.org&gt;</a>.</p>
+
+ <p>For information on coordinating and submitting translations of
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+ href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+ README</a>. -->
+Please see the <a
+href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+README</a> for information on coordinating and submitting translations
+of this article.</p>
+</div>
+
+<!-- Regarding copyright, in general, standalone pages (as opposed to
+ files generated as part of manuals) on the GNU web server should
+ be under CC BY-ND 4.0. Please do NOT change or remove this
+ without talking with the webmasters or licensing team first.
+ Please make sure the copyright date is consistent with the
+ document. For web pages, it is ok to list just the latest year the
+ document was modified, or published.
+
+ If you wish to list earlier years, that is ok too.
+ Either "2001, 2002, 2003" or "2001-2003" are ok for specifying
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+ year, i.e., a year in which the document was published (including
+ being publicly visible on the web or in a revision control system).
+
+ There is more detail about copyright years in the GNU Maintainers
+ Information document, www.gnu.org/prep/maintain. -->
+
+<p>Copyright &copy; 2013, 2017 Richard Stallman</p>
+
+<p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
+href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative
+Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</p>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
+
+<p class="unprintable">Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2017/08/27 14:56:06 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>