[okfn-discuss] Problems of nomenclature

Sat Mar 3 20:09:45 UTC 2012

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Chris Sakkas <sanglorian at gmail.com> wrote:
> First things first, I've been bold and nominated renaming 'Open content
> licenses' to 'Alternative copyright licenses'
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2012_March_3).
> I think that makes the most sense and it remains a coherent category.
> Hopefully you folks will back me up if it meets with opposition.
>
> (Perhaps someone could make a new article on 'Alternative copyright
> licenses' too, which could discuss all these different concepts).

I don't think "alternative" adds anything. Just "copyright licenses"
or "public copyright licenses". The latter conveys some information
that is true and is more used than "alternative". I said something
like that on the rename discussion. But the proposal as-is would be a
big improvement, thanks for pushing on it!

>> In the Open Access community Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad have defined
>> "libre" as "the removal of some permission barriers". I think this is highly
>> regrettable and we ran into this problem on  the OKF open-access list. I
>> believed (wrongly) that libre was well-defined - it isn't. The removal of
>> just one small barrier means that the mainstream "Open Access" community
>> will call an artefact "libre". For example allowing someone to put their
>> article into a repository named by a publisher could be described as libre.
>
>
> Dammit, that's really disappointing! It's interesting that the term libre
> was poisoned in the same way 'open content' was: a term drawn from FLOSS,
> redefined as 'some rights reserved'.

I think "open content" was defined or redefined or whatever in a
problematic fashion long before "libre OA" --
http://opencontent.org/definition/ dates from 1998 as discussed in
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1123 (I generally think berating
people for saying "open source" is stupid, but also find it hilarious
in a bad way that it got [mis]translated to meaning something
different than free software, leading to, or perhaps merely
contributing to, a long history of sorrow in non-software domains).
The author of that, David Wiley, has at least for the past several
years advocated primarily for CC-BY, but AFAIK is pretty attached to
his definition of "open content".

I thought about complaining about "libre OA" when the concept was
announced, as it was clearly degrading to the most unambiguous term
used (libre), but didn't out of some combination of "science" not
being my field and laziness. In any case, AFAIK "libre OA" is not
widely used and of people who have heard the term, I bet not many know
what it means. Maybe Peter Suber would be willing to issue an update
of some sort. In
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/08-02-08.htm he did say
"It's provisional in the sense that I'll continue to look for better
terms."

Mike