[okfn-discuss] David Wiley on SA / open content / OKD

Sat Jun 26 00:05:55 UTC 2010

"So, the OKF claim to define the open in open content. I’ve come to
terms with the fact that few people actually read what I write. But
that’s still no excuse for people coming along six years later (in
2004), co-opting my terminology, and then getting the definition wrong
by 180 degrees. If they want to define the open in open knowledge,
that’s their business. However, the definition of the open in open
content is available at http://opencontent.org/definition/." --
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1498

For some reason I read David's (characteristically provocative) piece
as being less about sharealike (SA) restrictions and more about how
noncommercial (NC) restrictions are more open than sharealike.
(Elsewhere David argues that open content can include NC restrictions
-- and on these grounds takes issue with OKD.)

While we have good examples of large, successful, sustainable
knowledge ecosystems with SA restrictions (F/OSS, Wikipedia, OSM, ...)
are there similar examples of such ecosystems with NC restrictions? I
guess there is a lot of learning material with NC restrictions -- but
it strikes me that with educational resources user *access* can seem
more important than *reuse*, and often the sustainability model is
based on some individual/organisation 'in the middle' selling
commercial reuse (a la 'CC+') rather than giving contributors a level
playing field to commercially exploit their contributions. Any
thoughts on this?

Re: the 'SA Fallacy' -- mistake here seems to be conflating 'SA
doesn't split the commons' (e.g. in the same way that NC clearly
excludes commercial reusers) with 'SA *promotes* interoperability'?
Also I understand the complaint with SA/interoperability is having
*multiple* SA licenses which don't fit together (e.g. BY-SA-NC /
BY-SA). If you have a *limited* number of SA licenses (GPL for code,
CC-BY-SA for content, ODbL for data), surely there aren't problems?
Could we do more to address this by having something like a
non-proliferation policy for SA licenses (presumably this doesn't
matter at all for attribution/public domain) as part of OKD? Don't
OSI/FSD basically have this with their certification process? I don't
see the sudden proliferation of SA licenses as an imminent problem --
but perhaps having a formal license review process as part of OKD
could be a good thing anyway in the longer term.

Finally interesting how he seems to be fairly flexible about the
definition of "openness" on something like philosophical grounds ("the
word has different meanings in different contexts") -- which in a
sense seems obvious [1] -- but seems to appeal to something like
*genetic* priority ("my terminology", "6 years later", etc) to argue
that his definition of open content is the correct one. Surely when we
arbitrarily define something, whether the context is legal,
industrial, scientific, etc, the definition should be evaluated on the
basis of some practical outcome (e.g. pipes fitting together) rather
than on who got there first!

Basically I get the sense that David is more concerned with "the
freedom of people" to use the license they want and to call it open
(even if this means there is not a single commons, but multiple for
different types of users) than the creation of an ecosystem (a single
commons) which is free for *anyone* to reuse.

[1] In the sense that one can't give a fixed, comprehensive account of
the 'essence' a word like Socrates attempts to do for 'truth', or
'justice'. Meanings change over time etc. This is different from
defining a specific word or phrase *for a specific purpose* -- like
'Fair Trade' (as opposed to 'was it a fair trade?').

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg