Page:Shrinking the Commons.djvu/29

 Contributors to open-content projects act from a (probably irreducible) diversity of motivations —from a desire to practice or to pass along the contributor’s unique skills or knowledge, to political opposition to the predominance of the proprietary production paradigm for informational goods and the agendas of the large and powerful enterprises that the dominant paradigm sustains, to the sense of satisfaction and reputational gains that derive from having one’s expertise recognized and appreciated, to the enjoyment of solving complex problems to simple altruism or the desire to advance human knowledge. Depending on their motivation, individual contributors to open-content projects may react differently to the discovery that the licenses authorizing them to modify and redistribute the content on which they worked are subject to possible termination. For example, those disinclined to see proprietization as an evil to be avoided (such as developers of BSD-licensed software) may be indifferent to the possibility of termination of the license. On the other hand, contributors motivated more strongly by a desire to build a commons of works that will remain freely reusable in perpetuity may view the risk of termination very differently. Those users may have contributed to the project based partly on the understanding that the work to which they contributed would remain forever available for others to copy and modify. Provisions of many existing open-content licenses encourage precisely this presumption. Under existing U.S. copyright law, however, licensors may be disabled from delivering upon a promise of a perpetual, irrevocable license.