Thanks for posting this, cel4145. These are very exciting and promising projects. I sometimes have that dizzying and nauseating feeling that a lot of great stuff is going on in composition, but I'm outside of it and don't know how to get involved. Do you ever get that feeling? It's so hard to stay on top of all these things and find the best ways to participate and encourage their growth and development.

I sometimes feel like the guy who shows up a volunteer agency and says, "I'd like to help out the poor and disadvantaged in this country, how do I start?" and gets a list of some 4,500 something organizations, each with their own ideologies, methods, and agendas...Kinda mind-blowing, to say the least.

Something that might be worth talking about in relation to open source is how the concept of a "fork" might translate into open content.

I think most people only hear about what's going on from reading the journals, going to conferences, and conversing with others F2F. So a lot of it's old news when they do learn about it. But you are also outside, on the web, and probably more in touch with cutting edge, novel projects than you think.

Meanwhile, a fork, to me, is the idea of starting a new development community to develop a piece of software in a new direction. But I would suspect in terms of open content, it's more about repurposing, and since so much open content might be individually produced (I'm speculating), it's more repurposing than forking. This is only an initial thought about how this might work. Why? What were you thinking?

Have you seen Stallman's take on the word content?

"Content"

If you want to describe a feeling of comfort and satisfaction, by all means say you are "content", but using it as a noun to describe written and other works of authorship is worth avoiding. That usage adopts a specific attitude towards those works: that they are an interchangeable commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and make money. In effect, it treats the works themselves with disrespect.

Those who use this term are often the publishers that push for increased copyright power in the name of the authors ("creators", as they say) of the works. The term "content" reveals what they really feel.

As long as other people use the term "content provider", political dissidents can well call themselves "malcontent providers".

Anyway, I was thinking about a community of scholars who begins working together on a project--say, wikis--and suddenly finds themselves splitting because of a fundamental difference of opinion on some aspect of the project (methodology, terminology, focus, philosophy, etc.) So, the end up with a "fork" and writing scholarship that is incompatible. Sometimes the two sides still get along well, but other times it's pretty nasty.

Tikiwiki recently underwent a fork and lost some of its star developers. As I understand, it's a fairly common event in free software programming. I'm just wondering how the "forking" would translate into scholarship and communities of scholars.

Hmmm...why "incompatible?" How do we know this would not be good? Sometimes forks are necessary and good for everyone over the long haul, just not necessarily a pleasureable experience for the community.

For example, forks sometimes represent poor project management in terms of project leadership. In fact, the threat of forks requires that those in charge of a project do try to make space for most concerns in order to prevent them; thus, the project represents more the voice of a community in a successful open source project. In other instances, a fork could represent where a project really does need to go in two different directions.

I notice you use "open source," Charlie. I'm sure you're aware of the split between "free software" (free as in freedom, not beer) and "open source," a term that takes the emphasis off the philosophy of the movement for the sake of seeming less threatening to business? I'd love to hear why you choose to use the "Open Source" term.

i'm not sure i like the "split" idea since it's very reductive. many people choose open source non-copyleft licenses because it offers more freedom. it's a different philosphy which is more inclusive and less restrictive. certainly that is one reason the term was coined, but BSD licensing existed before the GNU, and open source captures the spirt of that licensing as well.

meanwhile, forks occur in open source communities, which includes both copyleft and non-copyleft open source licensed products. we could certainly restrict the conversation to coplyleft, but your original comment referred to "open content." while david wiley's original thoughts on open content seemed to embrace copyleft alone, the definition now tends to trend toward copyleft and non-copyleft licensing, as well as open access which is not "open source." and i'm not sure that restricting the conversation to free software/copyleft provides much more insight into how forks might work, other than the fact that non-copyleft licenses which are open source are always open to commercial appropriation.

so, what would be the value here in restricting the conversation to copyleft alone?

Well, from a freedom point of view, the term open source is actually more restrictive, since the whole reason for its existence is to eliminate the emphasis the original term had on freedom. The term "open source" was coined after "free software," of course. According to my reading, "copyleft" was a nickname for the work Stallman was doing for the so-called "viral" GNU GPL license. The open source fork occurred because developers were concerned that the business types might confuse "free software" with "zero cost software" and thus be afraid to invest time and money into it. Of course, Stallman's whole point is that freedom needs to come before other concerns; "Linux" may be more "popular" after shedding some of its philosophical underpinnings, but the FSF's "GNU/Linux" brings us back to the deciding factor in all this. Now we've got companies releasing proprietary software and trying to pass themselves off as "open source," plus countless people using the term without any appreciation whatsoever for the philosophical directive behind the free software movement. It's kind of like people embracing communism because they want free healthcare, all the while being totally oblivious to the more important factors involved.

There was no open source/free software "fork." The open source definition is based on a policy definition that Debian was using, and is similar to the BSD license. Unix, my friend, was open source long before there was Linux or any GNU project :) In other words, open source software existed before and congruent with the creation of the free software definition, just not by the name of open source.

As for copyleft, it adds one additional restriction to the open source definition: that any copies and/or modifications which are redistributed must include the same license. In other words, use of the software is more restricted, and the Debian policy statement was created initially to be more inclusive, to include licensed sofware which was not copyleft.

FYI: calling proprietary software open source is a violation of trademark, and I believe that OSI does frown on that. Software can only be open source licensed if the license is approved by OSI (which is one benefit of the term "open source").

As for "GNU/Linux" that's Stallman's kick, and many who are free software advocates don't even go to that trouble. I'm one such person :)

I would recommend Bruce Perens's text in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Perens's discussion of open source gives a good historical overview which tends to be very balanced. Either that, or keep preaching Leninism, I mean Stallmanism, instead of Marxism ;)

Well, not Unix is, not to my knowledge, anyway, free software. That's the whole reason GNU was started; to provide a free alternative to UNIX.

I got my info from this essay on the GNU website. Pay special attention to the section called "Misunderstandings(?) of ``Open Source''"

As for the issue with GNU/Linux or Linux, the matter is not so much Stallman's kick as a desire to be accurate with terms. "Linux" refers only to Linus' kernel, whereas GNU/Linux refers to the operating system.

Read Marshall Kirk McKusick's text in Open Sources: Voices from the Revolution, and you'll see the genesis of the BSD, in which parts of the OS were open source, long before there was an open source term.

The problem, as I was getting to above (and I've read the FSF website) is that Stallman and the FSF site tend not to be the most balanced perspective. As a scholar, I'm sure you understand the problem with using a political organization as a nearly exclusive, main source, as its main rhetorical purpose is to promote a political cause with one particular view.

I realized after I posted above that I'm probably not being completely clear. Plus, I responded to your political rhetoric in a previous comment with my own political rhetoric by saying there was open source Unix long beforet there was the GNU and Linux ;) More accurately, as I understand it, the Berkeley people were working to provide an open source version of Unix before Stallman began FSF. So the FSF was started because there was not a completely open source version of Unix, but there were people working on it.

Anyway, enough with the history discussion. Gotta go :)