[okfn-discuss] Problems of nomenclature

Sun Mar 4 10:46:30 UTC 2012

As Mike mentioned, I’ve changed my application to ‘Public copyright
licenses’ and it’d be great to have your support over at Wikipedia
(although it doesn’t seem to be controversial). Does anyone know how long
the voting process takes, and whether I need to make the change myself or
if an admin will do it?

 *Mike: *

 I sent an email to Peter Suber yesterday mentioning that ‘libre OA’ is
inaccurate and wondering if he’d be prepared to change it.

 *David:*

 ‘Commons content’ is an interesting idea. It would emphasise the
connection to Creative Commons, which does make up the bulk of commons
content. It also solves a problem I was having with common content, which
was that converting it across to ‘common knowledge’ and ‘common software’
overlapped with current usage of those terms. 'Commons knowledge' and
'commons software', however, are non-ambiguous.

 What do other people think of ‘commons content’? (Assuming that we have a
term for that class of content at all; obviously the objections to
associating libre and proprietary commons content by placing them in one
category remain).

 *Kim:*

 I’m not married to the term ‘semi-libre’, and I’d be happy to hear
alternatives. How about ‘pseudo-libre’? That would emphasise that the
connection between libre and proprietary commons content is a superficial
one.

 But people do recognise a class of some rights reserved works that can be
shared at the very least verbatim and noncommercially, and I think it’s
counter-productive for us to refuse to recognise that class. That will just
result in people wrongly applying the terms ‘free’, ‘libre’ or ‘open’ to
the supercategory which is the worst of all possible worlds.

Definition is not endorsement.

>  CC-by-sa is the most pro-freedom licence in the Creative Commons suite -
> it is unambiguously a _libre_ licence. The ShareAlike in this case is an
> assurance of freedom into the future in the face of the current state of
> copyright which came about along these lines:
>
> http://wikieducator.org/Brief_History_of_Copyright
>
> CC-by-nc-sa on the other hand is (among other things) an assurance of a
> restriction (non-commercial use only) into the future. It is unambiguously
> non-libre.
>
 I agree with you. But there are both libre and non-libre public licences
that have a share-alike condition, that is they require adaptations to come
under the same licence as the original work. At the moment, this set of
licences and the works that come under them are being described as
‘copyleft’, which is just making things worse.

 What if instead of referring to these public licences as being
‘share-alike licences’ or ‘reciprocal licences’ (as I originally
suggested), which would lump libre and non-libre together, we refer to them
as having ‘reciprocal licensing terms’?

 That way, we avoid suggesting that libre and non-libre share-alike
licences fall into the same category, but we recognise that both of them
have the same mechanism – required reciprocity – even though the
consequences – enclosed libre or enclosed non-libre – are very different.

>  PS It will help with clarity of thinking to avoid the term "IP" (which
> appeared in Chris's e-mail below):
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#IntellectualProperty we
> are not talking about anything that has the rivalrous properties of
> "property".
>
 I am not giving up on the term IP any time soon, I’m afraid. I’m happy to
discuss why in a different thread, but I’d like to keep this one focused on
nomenclature in Wikipedia articles.

 PPS For software, some people say "free/libre and open" source software
> (FLOSS) which cover both open and libre software - understanding that all
> libre software is "open source" but some (a very small sub-set of) open
> source software is non-libre.
>
 Which open source software is non-libre?

 I’ve also suggested ‘free, libre and open cultural content’ (FLOCC) for
content, but that’s another topic for another time.

 *Peter:*

 What do you think about the term ‘commons open access’ for works where
some permissions have been granted? Then ‘libre OA’ could be reclaimed for
truly free and open works.

Thanks for the discussion folks,

*Chris Sakkas
**Admin of the FOSsil Bank wiki <http://fossilbank.wikidot.com/> and the
Living Libre blog and microblog <https://twitter.com/#%21/living_libre>.*
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