Why giving away great stuff
is such a great idea

Good ideas are worth money, so why are people giving them away for free? Join our experiment to find out.
Based on old and well established traditions in the radio amateur and radio hobbyist world, HCDX is offering our information free of charge, free to circulate, free to distribute, free to use and modify in
Why?
Because we believe that is has been proven through the years that we all benefit from this free circulation of knowledge.

Our information may be photocopied, redistributed, re-edited, rewritten, cut and pasted onto websites, handbills and articles all over the world.
And that's the point.
We don't want to control this information. It comes from all of us, and thus it belongs to all of us.
This doesn't mean that there are no copyrights.
There is!
Any work is copyrighted by the author. All rights to a particular work are reserved by the author. But it may be copied, distributed and/or modified as long as it follows the conditions set down in the Design Science License, which grants as much freedom as possible, as long as you too release your version under the same copyleft terms and conditions.

Open source has proved a very successful way of writing software. Now some of its supporters are trying out its methods elsewhere. Already there's open source music, open source encyclopaedias, open source law, even open source soft drinks.
Open source has also come to embody a political stand--one that values freedom of expression, mistrusts corporate power, and is uncomfortable with private ownership of knowledge.
It's "a broadly libertarian view of the proper relationship between individuals and institutions", according to open source guru Eric Raymond.

But it's not just software companies that lock knowledge away and release it only to those prepared to pay. Every time you buy a CD, a book, a copy of New Scientist, even a can of Coca-Cola, you're forking out for access to someone else's intellectual property. Your money buys you the right to listen to, read or consume the contents, but not to rework them, or make copies and redistribute them. No surprise, then, that people within the open source movement have asked whether their methods would work on other products. As yet no one's sure--but plenty of people are trying it.
And the experiment goes on.
As a contribution to it, the New Scientist has published an article under the terms of "copyleft", wanting to test "one of the boldest ideas of our time".

Here at HCDX we have worked under copyleft conditions for years, even when there were no such term. We just wanted to follow the traditions of free flow of information in some parts of the radio hobby world, both in Scandinavia and the United States.
Knowing the gains and benefits, we heartily welcome all newcomers in the world of "copyleft".
Hermod Pedersen, hcdx editor, January 2002