FON: open/closed - copyleft/copyright?

Most businesses believe in secrecy. We don´t. Most businesses believe in patents. We don´t. We are an open source company. We are also a blogged company that has so far not done any advertising, nor currently engages a PR firm. We live off the originality of our ideas. So after presenting my latest R&D ideas internally, I have decided to blog them one by one so readers have an opportunity to comment on them.You are welcome to read them. You are welcome to comment. You are welcome to “steal” our ideas, but what we ask in return is that if you copy them, let us know and make them “FON ready”. We are open source, so you can just download our firmware. If you are a hardware maker you are welcome to conctact me directly. Same if you are a programmer. You should also know that FON licenses its brand at no cost. We pay nothing to have products be FON ready and use our brand and we ask for no money either. We already have very large hardware makers such as Accton, who have signed licensing agreements with us.

From: R&D Projects at FON - Martin Varsavsky blog

Martin Varsavsky is the hot argentinian super-entrepreneur behind the FONero recruitment of FON revolutionaires, with a mission to get the whole world WiFi, as it seems. You can read and surf around the spanish startup at the FON website.

Of course, as a modern entrepreneur of today, he has his own blog (Michael Dell is obviously old school, read the whole Dell Hell story that Jeff Jarvis started off and backtrack it from there...).

Yes, as predominantly Ed and I worked ourselves through, now the beta version of a business principle for the 21st century has muddled through to this:

Transparency > Trust > Transaction > Transfer > Transformation

(I will have that elaborated in a separate blog essay when it is ready to go beyond intuitive, need to research it up a bit further in the conversation)

Fine so far.

But at the bottom of Martin's blog, you find;

Copyright © Martin Varsavsky

and (!)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

(?!?!?)

This makes me just puzzled. The FON software is Open Source, the brand is License-free, but the Martin Varsavsky WORDS are copyrighted. Or - are they CC?

Confusion, Chaos, Conflict. Life not without it. But now I have the first level here. Confusion. And I am not here to create chaos this time (at least ;). And hopefully getting the Conflict (or at least the contradiction) sorted out along the way.

technorati tags:fon, copyleft, copyright, opensource, creativecommons