Commercialism vs. community

“In every proposal I write to a client where I’m not doing corporate identity work, I give them the option to where I will, free of charge and as a benefit to the community, package and licence the work I do for them under a Creative Commons licence. Once I’m done with their work, I’ll personally distribute the work on my site of give the packages to them for distribution if they ever wish to open-source the project. It’s an absurd premise from a designer, to say ‘Hey, you pay me to make this for you, and then I’ll release it for free to everyone else.’ It was a risk I took to see if my clients had any interest in the surrounding community.”

In a socially-driven atmosphere on the brink of being devoured by powerful investors and American capitalism, I offered my clients an option to have their work released freely, under a community-supporting licence such as the Creative Commons Licences or the GNU GPL, as a free-of-charge option. The results were surprising. Will proprietary licences and commercialism destroy Web 2.0’s democracy?