[open-bibliography] Wikipedia project: bibliographic-archival data base

Tue Sep 13 18:13:18 UTC 2011

There's not a lot that I agree with the OCLC on, but in this case I'm
in 100% agreement with Roy.  Attempts to legislate language usage down
to the single word level are not only doomed to failure, but the
stridency will drive reasonable people away.

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> There is great importance in defining what is meant by "open". The Open
> Source community has put great effort into this through the Open Source
> Initiative (http://www.opensource.org/ ). It has now been able to reach the
> stage where "Open Source" is universally understood as "OSI-compliant".

This understanding isn't anywhere near as universal as you seem to
think.  Just a few days ago ReadWriteWeb (RWW) published a rant where
they totally misunderstood what open source is about.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/09/point-whats-this-i-hear-about.php
 If you were to talk to Richard Stallman, I bet he'd tell you that
"open" is meaningless and what you've got to insist on is "free"
(where he's the sole arbiter of what the word "free" means).  Such
zealotry is divisive.

In my opinion, inclusive approaches which attempt to find common
ground with interested parties are much more powerful.

Open is a spectrum.  I haven't looked at the Harvard license/terms of
service (which is what really matters, not the catch phrase they use),
but I suspect when I do I'll find the data is more open than it was,
but less open than I'd like it to be.

Tom