OpenContent Lizenz [was: Fwd: Re: [buug-l] (kein Betreff)]

[Michael Wiedmann]

Antwort von Florian auf mein etwas verwirrendes Posting. Z.Z. habe ich aufgrund 
von "Renovierungsarbeiten" meines Desktop-Standortes lediglich Webmail-Zugang
und der ist etwas gewöhnungsbedürftig und fehleranfällig (deshalb auch das
fehlende Subject).
  

----- Weitergeleitete Nachricht von Florian Cramer <cantsin at zedat.fu-berlin.de>
-----
Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 20:20:57 +0200
From: Florian Cramer <cantsin at zedat.fu-berlin.de>
Subject: Re: [buug-l] (kein Betreff)
To: Michael Wiedmann <mw at miwie.in-berlin.de>

Am Sonntag, 14. September 2003 um 20:07:33 Uhr (+0200) schrieb Michael
Wiedmann:
> Die meisten von Euch haben sicher wie ich in der aktuellen iX 10/03 den
Hinweis
> auf die OpenContent Lizenz gelesen (http://www.uvm.nrw.de/opencontent).

Ich lese iX und Linux-Magazin nicht mehr, seitdem ich LWN abonniert
habe. Ist die "Open Content License" von www.opencontent.org gemeint,
die jetzt nicht mehr geplegt und unterstützt wird?

Ich habe dazu gerade einen Artikel für die Londoner Netzkultur-Zeitschrift
MUTE geschrieben, den ich hier buug-exklusiv in einer 1150-Wörter-Langfassung
publiziere.

-F


The Opencontent.org Debacle


"OpenContent is officially closed. And that's just fine." With these
words, www.opencontent.org welcomes its visitors since June 30th. Many
of those who read them were less enthusiastic though.  opencontent.org,
after all, is the site which coined the whole term "open content",
provided two popular licenses for it -- the "Open Content License" and
the "Open Publication License" -- and functioned as a central resource
for the idea that  Free Software/Open Source philosophy could be used
for any kind of digital work.  Since the launch of opencontent.org in
1998, it had taken almost five years that the idea gained momentum
through outstanding projects like Wikipedia <http://www.wikipedia.org>,
the increasingly useful collaborative online encyclopedia published
under the GNU Free Documentation License, and a growing number of
publications and community Internet projects using open content
copylefts. There could hardly be a worse time for pulling the plug of
opencontent.org, and the story of its demise alone was creating enough
public relations damage to resemble other tactical, business-driven
'fear, uncertainty and doubt' campaigns against Free Software such as
SCO's courtroom action against Linux or Microsoft's successful lobbying
against an Open Source conference of the U.N.'s World Intellectual
Property Organisation (WIPO).

Opencontent.org went online in spring 1998, just few weeks after the
term "Open Source" had been invented by Linux advocates around Eric S.
Raymond, author of the essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and later a
disputed figure because of his right-wing gun-freak libertarianism.  The
coinage was a reaction to Netscape's decision of freeing its web browser
sourcecode as it should replace the term "Free Software" propagated
by the GNU project and its nonconformist head Richard M. Stallman,
with an IT business-compatible buzzword. A perhaps accidental
side-effect was that "Open Source" appealed to other net cultures and
communities as well because it wasn't specific to software.  The
translation of "open source" into "open content" seemed logical, and was
first made by David Wiley, at that time an educational computing
specialist and web developer at Marshall University, West Virginia.  His
announcement on Slashdot.org documents where the project historically
came from: "OpenContent is an attempt to take Content where GNU/FSF has
taken Software. [...] If Slashdot readers have "educational" content
they'd like to make freely available for others to use in its entirety
(like HOW-TO docs, etc.) while still maintaining ownership and some
assurance of proper recognition, they should check it out."
Consequently, the "Open Content License" published on opencontent.org
was a cut-and-paste of the GNU General Public License (GPL) which only
lacked the former's preamble and appendix and had all mentions of
"program" replaced with "OpenContent". In June 1999, the "Open
Publication License" was released in addition.  It allowed authors and
publishers to restrict on the modification and commercial reprinting of
their works. Drafted in collaboration with Free Software-friendly
publishing companies, the Open Publication License has been widely
adopted: Among others, computer handbooks by O'Reilly and Prentice Hall,
university course material, periodicals like the "Linux Gazette" and
political websites like www.spinsanity.com have been released under its
terms; a Google search of "Open Publication License" currently yields
19200 results.

What now seems to be the end of opencontent.org should in fact be a
transformation.  The site will superseded by the "Creative Commons"
<http://www.creativecommons.org> project in which Wiley has begun to
work as a "Director of Educational Licenses".  Founded in 2001 by
Internet law expert Lawrence Lessig, "Creative Commons" is a general
support platform for free information. It provides its own licensing
scheme, in fact a toolkit of 12 different licenses, each of them
providing a different combination of regulations for attribution,
commercial use and modification of a work, thus covering all kinds of
liberal distribution modes from Public Domain to GPL-style copyleft up
to works which retain all attributes of classical copyright except for
the permission to be circulated in the Internet. A web-based form
<http://creativecommons.org/license/> makes it quite simple to choose a
combination of Creative Commons license options.

In turn, both the original "Open Content License" and the "Open
Publication License" are no longer supported by its creator. While they
still can be used, there is no organisation ensuring its compatibility
to current legislation and defending it in court. Wiley's argument is
that there never was, so that, as he writes, "Creative Commons is doing
a better job of providing licensing options which will stand up in
court." Indeed: Unlike the GNU GPL and its maintainance and support
through the Free Software Foundation and Columbia University law
professor Eben Moglen, opencontent.org neither had institutional
support, nor legal expertise for its licenses, both of which Creative
Commons has in abundance. If Creative Commons and its licensing
scheme should become a similar focal point of Open Content activism as
the GNU project for Free Software, it would also do away with the
Babylonian confusion of mutually incompatible open content licensing
schemes like the "Scientific Design License (SDL)", the "Open Music
License", the "Open Audio License" of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, the "Free Art License", and so on. The legal know-how of
Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle and other Creative Commons directors along
with their efforts to internationalize the Creative Commons licenses
make the project appear more professional and, most importantly for open
content providers, trustworthier than the previous alternatives.

Still, issues remain: By publicly stalling opencontent.org and its
licenses, Wiley did his best to show his refusal of taking up
responsibility, instead of providing a sensible and
smooth upgrade path from opencontent.org to Creative Commons. The
existing Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike" license
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/> for example could have
simply acted as a "Open Content License v2.0", and a hypothetical "Open
Publication License v2.0" could just be a pointer to the Creative
Commons "Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0" license
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/>. Instead, Wiley
opted for a major publicity desaster, risking for example to alienate
and jeopardize people who had talked publishers or cultural and
educational institutions into releasing work under the Open Publication
License.  While Wiley's probably intended to act responsibly and
ground his project on a more solid foundation, the self-defacement of
the opencontent.org homepage instead contributed to what many perceive
to be the immaturity and instability of non-software copyleft.

Part of that perception also stems from the fact that major open content
licenses are incompatible to Free Software copylefts where they impose
restrictions on modification and commercial use.  Of the twelve Creative
Commons licenses, for example, only four make works free in the sense of
the Debian Free Software Guidelines, respectively Open Source according
to the Open Source Definition. The original Open Publication License
and, ironically, the GNU Free Documentation License (which allows
invariable sections in documents) are plagued as well with this issue;
the Debian project, the creator of Debian GNU/Linux, even considered
moving all GNU FDL-licensed software documentation from its "main" into
its "non-free" section.

"OpenContent is dead. Long live OpenContent"; David Wiley's last words
on opencontent.org tell the story in its full ambiguity.


Florian Cramer




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