It’s probably because although there is some overlap they also have important distinctions. Content doesn’t have agency in the same way that software does. Perhaps you could think of it as content saying things to you and software as doing things with you. Repeating what someone is saying to you is considered (rightly or wrongly) to have lower stakes than knowing what someone is doing to you. It’s the same idea behind the “sticks and stones” saying.

It comes down to the number of mouths that have to fed at the end of the day. Individuals producing news stories appear ‘free’ for the masses because they have alternative ways of earning, such as monetization on a large platform.

News agencies, however, are in a strange place these days. They used to be private and used to have a default subscription fee. You paid for the paper or you read one that someone left behind somewhere. Nobody’s buying papers anymore and they’ve had to move online. In addition they’ve been purchased by giant conglomerates or billionaires. It’s no longer a matter of making sure their employees are fed by producing a great product… the billionaires and CEO’s just want money. Since everyone’s ad-blocking these days they charge subscriptions and leverage tech to deny their product to those who don’t pay.

There will always be alternative news sources, and god knows I prefer them to 18 tv stations in the same city using the exact same propagandized scripts. You just have to put in the effort to look for them. That’s the fee you’re paying. Time.

You don’t know of any such non-profit? Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, OpenStreetMap Foundation, you don’t know of these?

I’m a supporter of free licensing of any and all works, but I recognize that it is most important for software because there you need transparency about how it actually works (and affects our lives), you need to be able to build on other people’s work, this is not necessarily equally important for all other types of work. It’s also a fair point that we have not really yet figured out a very good business model for free licensing, unfortunately.

Of course in general these are all still rising movements, think about how many scientific journals have CC licenses nowadays compared to like 15 years ago.

I’m worried abot both. And the internet turning from a free marketplace of ideas into a market of private user data and selling advertisements.

There’s concern about it where the content has utility beyond art, such as academic research and raw datasets.

That’s not to day art isn’t useful, but much of what people value about it is originality.

copywrite makes some sense but only for limited periods for the artists/writers. The current disneyification of it is bs.

I’m concerned about DRM violating my rights. But apart from that, media is largely for consumption, there’s very few reasons to need to edit a movie or something, and the laws at least attempt to cover fair use. DJs remix songs and stuff just fine. Or news article, you’d mostly want to quote them which is well defined in the legal framework. It’s important to remember that open-source doesn’t imply free of charge: there is paid GPL software.

Open-source is important in software because it’s much more complex, and you can end up in a situation where software you bought doesn’t work because the company refuses to fix it, or straight up stops working because the company went bankrupt 10 years ago and things have changed too much. Proprietary software is a black box that can be doing literally anything, and legally, you’re not even really allowed to reverse engineer it to even make sure it does what it says it does.

Stallman started the free software movement out of frustration with a printer driver that he knew how to fix, but the company wouldn’t give him the source code so he could fix it, and I believe at the time it would also have been illegal to reverse engineer it and patch it, or at the very least it was against the license. And that’s also my reason for using open-source software: not because I want free stuff, but because I want libre stuff that I can fix and maintain. Most people won’t, and that’s where the sharing clause comes in: someone else that can patch it will, and everyone can just use that.

Ideally things would be free and widely available but that’s too commie for most people and we’re headed in the polar opposite direction. Buuut there’s always the high seas where you can set your own moral compass.

Because high quality content needs income to continue existing, and you generally get that income via a subscription or the people making your content run out of money and go get jobs.

Edit: just look at what’s happened to journalism over the last 30y if you’re having a hard time understanding why paying journalists and other writers is important. Very few high quality outlets have survived, and they’re largely on life support if they’ve not been bought up to push some billionaire’s politics.

Remember that we live in the age of open/free content. So much is available under creative commons, or otherwise freely available compared to the pre internet era.

I don’t have much to add here and I haven’t paid much attention if the problem gets worse (though I think freely licensed content is rather important too), but this year I found some anarchist (and in general some hard-left leaning) bands and music artists that provide their music for free and it’s sooo nice, makes me want to donate to them:)

Also as I’m learning linux I’ve found some open source books which is very nice of them too.

They/we are concerned about free works in general. I’m not sure where you got the idea people aren’t.

I’m making an effort to pick more libre/free content, it just takes a lot more effort to fully make the switch than I had anticipated. We should really be pushing for more open, freely licensed content. I’d estimate that most Lemmy users are also Linux users, so it shouldn’t be too hard to convince people. I’ve been under a rock for so long that my issue is simply not know what the alternatives are.

Free and open source software and content has never been more prolific, nor has it ever been so widespread and successful. It’s not going anywhere.

Your personal exposure to it, and what you may see and hear of it can fluctuate and vary, depending on where you’re looking who you’re listening to. It can also be affected by marketing pushes from for-profit companies. That doesn’t mean there’s any less of it or that it’s somehow dying.

There had never been a time when free and open source of software and content has been so prolific, successful, and popular. It will only get more so moving forward. And while there are certainly those who would work against it, I doubt there is much to fear about it going away.

There are non-profits around every community and city and settlement pretty much throughout the world … they’re called libraries that house plain old paper books that are more or less free to read for anyone interested.

Most of the useful, relevant, education, informative and useful content we need as individuals is already freely available in open source books and reading material in license free ebooks and websites - the internet archive has a ton of content - wikipedia is also a great resource and if it doesn’t have the relevant or objective information you want, it is usually a starting point for the reader to find more.

The majority of the rest of the internet … I’d say about 80% to 90% of it is just useless mindless repeated, rehashed, reposted content from what is already available in libraries … or it’s just useless entertainment nonsense to fill people’s time with bits of information to make us laugh, smile or worry.