T-shirts and more ...

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 03:08:26AM +0200, Peter Gerwinski wrote:
> I herewith offer to create T-shirts and other merchandising articles
> with the "Europa riding a gnu" graphics - if possible, before the
> Linux-Tag.

Great.  :)
That would be a huge advantage to have them.

>   * T-shirts. On the other side can be a text "This T-shirt is a
>     free T-shirt. You can copy it and/or modify it under the terms
>     of the GNU General Public License ...".

I am critical of the "free T-shirt" text idea.

---
A T-shirt cannot have the same freedoms attached as digitial
information can have, because a T-shirt is physical item 
and will be a property of somebody all the time. 
You also cannot copy it without much effort.

The graphics for the T-shirt in digital format can be copied of course, 
but the difference is subtle and will not be obvious even to hackers.

In the effort to secure the rights for Free Software authors to innovate
we are trying to make the point that physical proptery (an apple),
a piece of work (book content) and an idea (plot of the book) are
completly different things which need to be treated differently by
the community and the law.

Proponents of patents of software try to make people think
that this is all intellectual property. Because people know 
the concept of physical proptery they are tricked into
extending this concept on works and ideas. 
---

Using the "free T-shirt" text will not help in explaining this to people.
As a joke it is to hard to understand or explain, IMHO.


(Well if you are really crazy you can take my explainatory text,
edit it until it is understandable and add it under 
the "This is a free T-shirt" slogan on the T-shirt...... )

	Bernhard

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