Tapping into the Digital Tipping Point

For some reason, the idea of open source film is one that exerts a strong fascination on people. I've written about it before, and here's another one:

The Digital Tipping Point film project is an open source film project about the big changes that open source software will bring to our world. Like the printing press before it, open source software will empower average people to create an immense wave of new literature, art, and science.

...


The first DTP film will follow my individual personal growth from being an attorney who feared computer technology to being a community activist who picks up technology tips while shooting this movie, and brings that technology back to a local public school.

So far, so dull, you might think. But more interestingly:

We will make as many films as the open source film community would like to make. The DTP project will actually be many, many films made about free open source software. We are giving away our footage under a Creative Commons license on the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection.

There's another aspect to this. The 300 or so hours of interviews that have been conducted for this film will form an invaluable record of some of the key people in the open source world, a resource that future historians will be able to tap.

Which reminds me: I really must put online the hundreds of hours of interviews that I did for Rebel Code six years ago: it would make an interesting foil to the present material.

The Creative Commons Ecosystem Up Close

Larry Lessig has a nice example of how CC materials can feed off each other in all sorts of creative ways. In this case, the result is the aptly-named "C-shirt".

Learning about OpenLearn

I wrote some while back about the Open University's plans to offer its materials as open courseware. Its dedicated site, called OpenLearn, is now up and running, with lots of interesting content. The licence? - a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.

OpenWetWare

I've always rather like the term 'wetware', so I suppose I'm duty-bound to promote something calling itself OpenWetWare:

OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering. OWW provides a place for labs, individuals, and groups to organize their own information and collaborate with others easily and efficiently. In the process, we hope that OWW will not only lead to greater collaboration between member groups, but also provide a useful information portal to our colleagues, and ultimately the rest of the world.

In fact it's so cool, it offers its content under not one, but two open content licences: CC and GFDL. (Via Public Library of Science - Publishing blog.)

Open Music Lives Happily Ever After

Now here's a heartening tale of musicians doing all kinds of creative things with CC music and getting their just desserts - including 15 minutes of fame with a certain lonelygirl15, and heaps of dosh.

Getting Creative with Money

The standard cry is: How do you make money from free? Well, Jamendo has a few ideas:

Jamendo sells advertising space on the jamendo.com web site and in the low-fi streamed music. We guarantee the hi-fi "peer-to-peer" music to be ad-free. This revenue helps us covering the bandwidth cost.

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Jamendo drives lots of traffic to the artist's official web site as well, which helps to sell more physical CDs (if the artist sells CDs from their web site). Also, Jamendo's blogging capabilities help artists to spread in the blogosphere.

Finally, we are developing more tools to distribute Creative Commons music commercially. The revenue split will be somewhere around 80/20, with 80 for the artist.

(Via Creative Commons Blog.)

The Cost of Freedom - Not

"The cost of freedom in the digital age" is a sadly misguided article on openDemocracy that questions whether Creative Commons, open source and open access are "a just reward for creative endeavour", and concludes:

Free dissemination systems such as open access and creative commons are good and should be supported. The most excluded in society will benefit from not having to pay. But creative commons is not the right alternative to rewarding content-creators and innovators. We are still only at the dawn of the digital revolution. It is likely that by the time we get to sunrise, more equitable alternatives will have been found. Until that happens, whoever ends up picking up the bill for content creation, there is little justice in charging the credit cards of scientists or short-changing authors of books and composers of music.

Well, no, actually: scientists do not pay with their credit cards for open access: the cost may be author-side, rather than reader-side, but it is picked up by one of the scientist's sponsors - be it the grant-giver (like the Wellcome Trust) or academic institution.

Similarly, it is incorrect to say that authors of books and composers of music are "short-changed" just because they adopt a creative commons licence, or to call creative commons an "alternative to rewarding content-creators and innovators". There are well-attested cases of sales being boosted when a book is released under a CC licence (just ask Cory Doctorow or Yochai Benkler): in other words, more reward, not less. And even when sales aren't boosted, there are numerous other ways of making money from the reputation that CC publication can bestow (public appearances, consultancy, etc.).

Looking at new-style content distribution with the blinkers of old-style publishing inevitably misses these facets. Not so much the cost of freedom, then, as the cost of fettered thinking.

Creative Commons Made Clare

...Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho’ the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go...

Any pamphlet that begins with a quotation from John Clare about the first enclosure movement is clearly doing something right. As it happens, Rosemary Bechler's Unbounded Freedom, nominally "A guide to Creative Commons thinking for cultural organisations", does just about everything right. It is probably the single best short introduction to intellectual monopoly issues I have ever read. It is well written, accessible, packed with good examples and surprisingly comprehensive.

What's even more amazing is that it comes from the British Council, a body that used to be even stodgier than the British Library. Clearly - or Clarely - stodge ain't what it used to be. (Via OpenBusiness.)

Update: There's now a blog for discussing this book and its ideas. Sadly, there are already some rather obtuse comments that wilfully misrepresent the idea of open content. We've still got a long way to go....

Open vs. Free vs. Creative

The philosophical schism between open source and free software is well known, but there's another interesting split emerging between free software and the Creative Commons movement. This isn't exactly new, but as the open content movement begins to gain momentum, it's an issue that people are starting to worry about.

If you want a good introduction to the basics of the dispute, Intellectual Property Watch has a useful report from the recent Wizards of OS 4 conference, where these tensions were exposed.

A Licence to Print...Licences

Licensing lies at the heart of free software. Indeed, it could be argued that Richard Stallman's greatest legacy is the GNU GPL, since that first showed how to preserve the essential liberty of free software, and how to deal with free-riders. But as well as a boon, licences are also a bane: there are too many of the damn things, which is why I was a little unkind to the Honest Public Licence idea, good in itself.

In a way, it's surprising that it has taken the open source world so long to do some navel-gazing and look closely at the state of open source licences. The result, a draft of the License Proliferation Committee Report, makes fascinating reading.

Originally, the LP Committee started to divide the OSI approved licenses into "recommended," "non-recommended" and "other" tiers. As we met and discussed, however, it became apparent that there is no one open source license that serves everyone's needs equally well. Some people like copyleft. Some don't. Governmental bodies have specific needs concerning copyright rights. As we discussed which licenses should be "recommended," it became clear that the recommended licenses were really the same as licenses that were either widely used (for example the GPL), or that had a strong community (for example Eclipse). Thus, we switched from the "recommended"/"non-recommended" terminology to a more descriptive terminology of:

-Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities

-Special purpose licenses

-Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses

-Non-reusable licenses

-Other/Miscellaneous licenses

We thought that these more descriptive categories may help people initially picking a license to use one of the more popular licenses, thereby helping to reduce the numbers of different licenses commonly used. We realize that the majority of open source projects currently use the GPL and that the GPL does not always play well with other licenses. We also realize that the GPL is a great license choice for some people and not so great a license choice for others. Thus, we can't just recommend that everybody use the GPL.. While such a recommendation would solve the license proliferation problem, it is not realistic.

We encourage new licensors to use licenses in the "popular and strong communities" group if any licenses in that group fit their needs. There are only nine licenses in this group and if everyone considered these licenses first when choosing a license for their project, some of the issues relating to license proliferation would diminish.

What's particularly interesting is that there are just nine licences in the "popular and strong communities" group, and that they are mainly the ones you'd expect:

- Apache License, 2.0

- New BSD license

- GNU General Public License (GPL)

- GNU Library or "Lesser" General Public License (LGPL)

- MIT license

- Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL)

- Common Development and Distribution License

- Common Public License

- Eclipse Public License

Most of these are well known; the only "strange" ones are the Common Public License, an early IBM choice, and Sun's Common Development and Distribution License.

Also of note is the Wizard Project:

The wizard assists new licensors in choosing which licenses meet their goals. The wizard also lets licensors find licenses that almost meet their goals. We hope that being able to generate a list of existing licenses that meet defined goals will lessen the need for people to create their own new licenses.

This is very similar to a tool available on the Creative Commons site. Indeed, it's hard not to get the feeling that on this occasion the open source world is generally following developments in the open content world - not necessarily a bad thing, and a sign of the growing maturity of the latter.

The Wiki-God Speaks...Mysteriously

While Wikipedia seems always in the news (as the previous post indicates), the man who started it all - no, not Jimmy Wales, but Ward Cunningham - is surprisingly low profile. So it's always good to come across an interview with him. I found the following particularly interesting:

The Creative Commons Attribution license is the "technology" we need to save patterns. If we'd known this 15 years ago we would not be in the mess we find ourselves in today. Instead creative individuals would be retelling the patterns in a way that resonates with every developer while still preserving a thread back to the analysis that led to each pattern's initial expression.

Unfortunately, I don't really know what he means. God-talk, I suppose. (Via Creative Commons Blog.)

The Future of Media

The Future of Media Report has two main things going for it. First, it comes from an Australian group, which gives it a slightly different perspective on things. Secondly, it is packed full of interesting graphs and charts. Make that three: it's available under a liberal CC licence.

Open Access...to Search Spam

Open access is usually about being able to read high-value texts that are normally only available for a correspondingly high fee. But, in reality, it's about access for free to stuff. For example, as Open Access News points out, you can have open access to "value-added" search spam data (and note the scrupulously precise use of the CC licence at the bottom).

The Economics of Open Access Books

I've written before about open access books; but such is my sad state of excitement when I come across good examples, I feel obliged to pass on another one. The home page for the book Introductory Economic Analysis by R. Preston McAfee declares itself to be "the open source introduction to microeconomics" no less, and the online blurb explains why, and also offers some interesting thoughts on the economics of academic book publishing:

Why open source? Academics do an enormous amount of work editing journals and writing articles and now publishers have broken an implicit contract with academics, in which we gave our time and they weren't too greedy. Sometimes articles cost $20 to download, and principles books regularly sell for over $100. They issue new editions frequently to kill off the used book market, and the rapidity of new editions contributes to errors and bloat. Moreover, textbooks have gotten dumb and dumber as publishers seek to satisfy the student who prefers to learn nothing. Many have gotten so dumb ("simplified") so as to be simply incorrect. And they want $100 for this schlock? Where is the attempt to show the students what economics is actually about, and how it actually works? Why aren't we trying to teach the students more, rather than less?

(This closely mirrors Linus' own feelings about the high cost and low quality of proprietary software.)

As a consequence of this unholy alliance of greed and shoddiness, McAfee suggests:

The publishers are vulnerable to an open source project: rather than criticize the text, we will be better off picking and choosing from a free set of materials. Many of us write our own notes for the course anyway and just assign a book to give the students an alternate approach. How much nicer if in addition that "for further reading" book is free.

Introductory Economic Analysis is truly open access, as the author explains: "You are free to use any subset of this work provided you don't charge for it, and you make any additions or improvements to it available under the same terms." To be precise, it is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. Although I've only just started working through the text, I can heartily recommend it for its pervasive clarity and gentle wit - not qualities that you normally associate with economics textbooks.

As well as for the generous gift of the book itself, I'm also grateful to McAfee for the link he gives to a site that's new to me, called The Assayer, which describes itself as "the web's largest catalog of free books." It turns out the vast majority of these are in the fields of science, maths and computing. It's not a huge collection, but since it includes titles as fine as McAfee's, things are clearly looking up in the world of open access books.