Free As In Freedom: But Whose Freedom?

It would be hard to overstate the contribution of Richard Stallman to the digital world. The founding of the GNU project and the creation of the GNU General Public License laid the foundations for a wide range of free software that permeates computing from smartphones to supercomputers. Free software has also directly inspired like-minded movements based around sharing, such as open access and open content (Wikipedia, notably). 

On Techdirt.

Time for Amazon to Pay its dues to Open Source?

It's nearly summertime. How do I know? Not, of course, by looking at the iffy British weather outside, but because Google's Summer of Code is here again:

On The H Open.

Open Source Social Documentation for Museums

Again, open source reaches ever-new bits:

The new MAA Documentation System combines open-source technologies with deep social computing principles to create a truly innovative approach to museum documentation. The new MAA Documentation System shifts the age-old documentation principles of standardized description and information accumulation to multi-vocal and multi-source accounts and distributed documentation.

For the past few years, the MAA has been developing an open-source Documentation System. With over 20 years experience of developing its own Documentation Systems and Collections Management Systems, the MAA is just about to finish one of the most ambitious upgrades of its history. In fact, this system is the result of a complete re-think of its documentation practices. Thought the new system takes account of documentation standards, such as SPECTRUM, and newer developments such as CollectionSpace, it differs from the traditional approaches is several key respects.

And if that isn't wonderful enough, this new project comes from Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology - known to its friends as Arch and Anth. Its old, Victorian(?) building was one of the most atmospheric places in Cambridge.

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FixYa Fixes the Real-Life Support Hole

Although free software has a reputation for patchy documentation and non-existent support, that's not really true at all: there's buckets of stuff out there, usually written by extremely knowledgeable people, and lots of enthusiasts ready to advise. What *is* true, is that everyday consumer devices haven't had anything like that deep, community-generated online support.

FixYa asks: why not?

FixYa was founded by a frustrated consumer who noticed that most manufacturers of gadgets, electronics and consumer products were not providing adequate technical support through their web sites, despite these products becoming more and more technologically advanced. Whether it was a digital camera, printer, or laptop - manufacturers were not allocating the necessary resources to meet customers' increased demand for technical support, troubleshooting, and easy access to product manuals. It was from this lack of easy-to-access technical information and product support that the FixYa online technical support community was formed.

FixYa is now the largest online source for free technical advice on gadgets, electronic equipment and consumer products. FixYa users can quickly and easily post technical questions for Experts in the FixYa troubleshooting forums - seeking solutions for problems or advice/instructions on proper usage of a product. Users can also upgrade to Premium Assistance to get fast, guaranteed technical assistance from Top Experts - via posting or Live Chat.

The power of FixYa stems from the unique, community-generated content found in the FixYa troubleshooting forums. Technical problems and solutions posted on FixYa are based on users' real life experiences, rather than the hypothetical scenarios presented in product manufacturers' FAQs. And through FixYa's unique rating system, problem solutions are continually refined, with the goal of offering users the most helpful and accurate technical support information possible for any consumer product.

Sounds like a classic open source/open content/user-generated business model. But the cynic in me said that it was doubtless deeply flawed by wickedly appropriating all that content for itself. Nope:

All content, either text, pictures, or graphics, on the site that has been contributed by users is designated as Open Content. All such content may be copied, reproduced, distributed, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted or transmitted as long as (1) it is not displayed on a commercial site (except on message boards) or used for commercial purposes, (2) prominent attribution is given to FixYa, and (3) attribution is given to the original author(s) as listed on FixYa.com. If the original author is listed as "Anonymous" on FixYa.com, attribution to the author is not required.

FixYa maintains a compilation copyright on its user-submitted content. This user-submitted content may by reproduced in part for non-commercial purposes as described in the paragraph above, but may not be reproduced as a whole through any medium without the express permission of FixYa.com.

My only criticism would be that "Open Content" is rather vague here. Maybe it would be better to use the cc-by-nc licence, which seems to fit the bill.

Writing the Book on Open Documentation

One of the things I really like about Matt Asay's blog is its total candour, which extends to handing out what most companies would regard as confidential business information:

the vast majority of our deals are fed by two direct sources: those who read our documentation and those who actually download and try our Enterprise code. Now, we also know that most of these people first start with our Community code (and often evaluate it for months, reading documentation and visiting our website in the meantime).

What does this mean? It means that if our demand generation software is telling us that someone has both read documentation and evaluated Enterprise, the odds of them buying support from Alfresco are huge. We want to be calling that prospect immediately.

But it also means that documentation is a huge opportunity for open-source companies to drive sales. Documentation is often treated as the shabby cousin of software development, but it is really the essential link between development and dollars. It's hard to motivate good documentation.

The other lesson I'd draw from this is that open source (and selling it) is far less about the code than you might think. Similarly, I'd say that open content, for example, is not just about the raw words, images or the sounds, but very much the "documentation" - that is, the packaging/service - that you provide around it, too.

Open Provenance Architecture

Interesting:

Ultimately, our aim is to conceive a computer-based representation of provenance that allows us to perform useful analysis and reasoning to support our use cases. The provenance of a piece of data will be represented in a computer system by some suitable documentation of the process that led to the data. While our applications will specify the form that such a documentation should take, we can identify several of its general properties. Documentation can be complete or partial (for instance, when the computation has not terminated yet); it can be accurate or inaccurate; it can present conflicting or consensual views of the actors involved; it can be detailed or not.

OpenOffice.org Premium

Now here's an idea. Take something that's free, and add value to it without adding to the price. Enter OpenOffice.org Premium:

What's new?
* Clip Art (currently more than 2,800 objects)
* Templates (number varies by language)
* Samples (number varies by language)
* Documentation (if available)
* Fonts (more than 90 fonts)

It's bigger, and it may be better for some. In any case, it's free. (Via Linux and Open Source Blog.)