What do music and software have in common, and how far can you apply the principles of the free software movement to the music industry? Those are questions that pianist Kimiko Ishizaka and I set out to answer in 2012 when we released the Open Goldberg Variations and again in 2015 with the Open Well-Tempered Clavier. Now, we are asking for support for our next big Bach project on Kickstarter.com.

All these projects focus on the “source code” of music written hundreds of years ago by J.S. Bach: newly typeset semantic MuseScore files for the written notes, and studio-grade master tracks for the audio recordings, with everything licensed under Creative Commons Zero for maximum reuse and distribution. The results have been excellent, with people enjoying easy and free access to this music and the ability to use it in their own works, which have included feature length films, YouTube videos, museum exhibits, advertisements for business, research projects, and more.

It isn’t completely an apples-to-apples analogy, though. There is no mechanism in our projects to preserve the license and apply it to derivative works. If someone uses our recording or arranges the MuseScore notes into another piece, there is no mandate that these new works also be released using permissive licensing. But the freedoms to obtain, read, modify, and distribute the source code for our music are analogous, and we’ve felt inspired and well supported by the free software scene since day one.

Kimiko has performed at numerous free software conferences and events — such as DrupalCon Prague, Observe.Hack.Make., RMLL, and Festival du Domaine Public — and our projects have been covered by the tech press. We even found a collaborative partner in the free software stalwart Michael Tiemann (of GCC and Red Hat fame) who brought us to his Manifold Studio twice for exciting music projects.

And yet, nothing screams “YOU MATTER TO FREE SOFTWARE” more than Richard Stallman writing to you personally.