Re: <nettime> [Fwd: Re: [ox-en] Felix Stalder: Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology]

[Florian Cramer <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de>]

Am Dienstag, 26. August 2003 um 17:07:02 Uhr (+0200) schrieb Felix
Stalder:
 
> These limitations refer to the kind of problems that can be addressed
> through the current form of social organization developed in the Open
> Source Movement. The way Open Source Projects are organized reflects
> the specifics of problem -- developing software -- and thus they
> cannot serve as a model to address problem with very different
> characteristics.
> 
> This does not mean that other problems, for example, the development
> of drugs, cannot be organized in an open way, but this 'open way' will
> have to look very different from the way Open Source Software projects
> are organized because the problem of creating drugs is very different
> from the problem of creating software. In other words, there is an
> intimate relationship between the characteristics of the problem and
> the social organization of its solution.

A good example are "Open Content" licenses. They have departed
significantly from Free Software/Open Source licenses wherever they allow
to restrict modification and commercial distribution of a work. Therefore,
the two major "Open Content" licenses, the GNU Free Documentation License
(used by, among others, the Wikipedia) and the Open Publication License,
are non-free or non-Open Source. As a consequence, the Debian project
recently considered moving software documentation released under the GNU
GDL into its non-free section. - The same is true, btw., for the 12
licenses "Creative Commons" <http://www.creativecommons.org> offers of
which only 4 qualify as "Free" or "Open Source" according to the Debian
Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Definition. If "Open Content"
needs other legal regulations than Free Software, then obviously because
of the different social issues of writing, for example, books as opposed
to writing software. (Which doesn't mean that these fields couldn't
converge very soon - for example through the need for authors to write
complex XML markup, use revision control and content management systems
etc., so that the traditional distinction will get more and more blurred.)

Nevertheless, this is a good opportunity to question the venerable
copyright statement of Nettime:

"distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission".

In order to turn Nettime into a truly public and free resource, I suggest
to change this line into

"distributed via <nettime>; unless stated otherwise by the author,
permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1"


-F
-- 
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