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> One piece of advice that I think is actually quite bad, or at least I've had extremely bad experiences with, is asking people for something. I've often cold-emailed artists, programmers and other hobbyists asking them to make their work libre/free (artists CC-BY/CC-BY-SA/CC0, programmers GPL, hobbyists some type of OSH or CERN license) and I don't think I've ever gotten a positive response.

In case you’re interested in constructive feedback, what you’re doing here sounds more like advocating for someone to provide some social good, but couching it in passive language.

With you not knowing these people, the ask itself is extremely presumptuous and the approach you describe of using passive language likely lands on them as a passive aggressive maneuver. Many people find that that approach to be manipulative and offensive.

If you’d just like personal use for free, you should ask for that directly and maybe share why that would be helpful for you, so that they can approach it as an act of sympathy or charity.

If you are invested in the principles of free/libre works, then you should advocate for that directly explain why the principle is so important to you that you’d engage with a stranger about it.

In both cases, you’re still likely to get a lot of closed doors and hostile responses, but you would at least be doing these people the kindness of being direct about what you want and why you want it.

Thanks for the feedback.

I suspected as much in terms of the passive language being perceived as passive aggressive. I didn't want to come off as aggressive as most of the time I really like the person or their work and I certainly don't want to strong arm them into doing something they don't want to do.

I think your advice is good to try and personalize the story and be direct about it. I don't have any illusions that this will be successful but at least it won't fail in the same way.

That being said, I can imagine an organization that promotes libre/free work making a blanket email that does just that (I've even read a few myself). The reason is clear because it's the organizations mission and, in that context, direct language would be preferred.

Food for though. I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work.

> I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work.

You’d up the odds a lot if you offered to pay them to relicense the work.

It would say a lot that you’re willing to invest in these principles you care about, and would make it easier for them to quantify the change to what they likely see as an asset portfolio.

What’s currently a charitable plea becomes a philanthropic negotiation.

In some cases I've offered to pay with the same outcome. Sometimes the offer to pay came after the initial email, other times it was in the form of cryptocurrency and others, I'm pretty sure, it was offered initially but, regardless, all of these cases might have had the framing of the offer poison the interaction from the outset.

My next experiment is to frame it in terms of a purely business transaction with the condition that the work released under a libre/free license, making sure not to use any of the passive language I've used before, etc. The issue is always understanding what a fair price is and, for my own personal standards, make sure the artist understands what kind of terms they're agreeing to (the equivalent of "informed consent").

> Food for though. I do wonder if there is any strategy that would work.

You start by getting them to license the work to you. Unless the person you're asking is a software developer, of course, their first reaction probably isn't going to be quite as "free" as the licenses we're used to around here, but plenty of artists are perfectly willing to grant informal licenses, especially if scoped to some project you have in mind.

(This should go without saying, but this is an SV startup-centered community, so maybe it needs to be specified, but you should not abuse the informality of such terms if you want to convince people any further.)

Then you probe to license their work to other people who aren't you but might be like you in wanting to prepare derivatives of the work, except that they might not have had the temerity to ask. You should realize that this is a much taller ask, especially outside software circles, because people have intuitions about the integrity of their work that public licenses are expressly designed to waive.

At some point in the process you might consider offering to pay for the equivalent of retroactively commissioning the piece to relicense it! This frames what you want as a slightly-twisted variation on a relationship artists in particular are relatively well-equipped to deal with, and usually comes with an understanding of what the buyer can do with the output— "How much would you charge to commission a work to be used for any purpose with unlimited distribution?"

> In case you’re interested in constructive feedback, what you’re doing here sounds more like advocating for someone to provide some social good, but couching it in passive language.

To add to this, artists have lots of experience with people asking for free stuff and couching it in "social good" language. In their experience, these people are invariably assholes, and they don't want to deal with you long enough to find out that you are one too.

Artists get asked to do free or barely paid work all the time in my experience. Often because the person asking doesn't want to pay a fair rate for it. Often the person doesn't take a direct no and keeps nagging them. When someone nags you about something for the five thousandth time in your life you tend to be pretty pissy about it. It's a necessary defense mechanism to preserve ones mental well being.

Asking for something is not the same as asking for free stuff. It’s especially not the same as asking someone who is trying to make a living creating things to just start giving them away. It’s not surprising to me that this kind of suggestion is met with hostility.

I have enough of a model of people to understand why there's pushback but at the same time the leap from "asking for something" to "asking something for everyone" doesn't seem like a big one.

I also find it confusing how people can use clips from movies, songs etc. not in the public domain or use public domain works outright but not see how contributing to the commons benefits society.

I appreciate your comment but my feeling is that a closer understanding is that the overton window is such that fair use, public domain and old work enriching the commons are so taken for granted that people have forgotten how important they are.

> The leap from "asking for something" to "asking something for everyone" doesn't seem like a big one.

Sorry to reply again, but this is quite surprising to me! I would feel very differently about an individual asking me for a copy of my work for personal use because they couldn't afford it / couldn't find a copy / wanted to learn from it, etc. vs. someone asking me to make my work freely available to all.

Regardless of how you feel about the principals behind why someone should do that, I hope you see there are very real differences in what you are asking them to do.

> the leap from "asking for something" to "asking something for everyone" doesn't seem like a big one.

It seems like an enormous leap to me. Imagine I’ve been approached by someone asking for a free license to my software. They’re probably unlikely to pay me anything (whether unwilling or unable doesn’t matter), so my decision has a likely loss to me of $0 and I can decide if I like the proposed project enough to say “sure, why not?!”

Contrast that with giving my software away to everyone, including people would would pay the money that I use to buy food and shelter.

Would you be willing to provide examples of the types of works you are asking to be made libre/free? Or provide examples of how you are asking? It's tough to provide advice without knowing what / how you are asking. (No need to name anyone specifically.)

I saw from some other responses where you are coming from re: the principals of giving to the commons, and I do sympathize with that in general.

On the flip side, I hope you understand that there are many artists and programmers who are asked to work for free / "for exposure" on a daily basis. Exposure and the common good, unfortunately, does not pay the rent.

For many folks asking for their work to be given away freely is akin to saying "I feel your work is worthless". Or worse "I feel your work is worth something, but I / the world should be able to benefit from your work without you being compensated for providing me that benefit."

Even for folks sympathetic to free/libre principals, being able to give away one's work freely to the world is to be in a position of privilege, where they can work purely for principal of the common good because their own material needs are already being met. For many folks, that simply isn't the case.