Patrick.

Although you would like to avoid a binary approach there must be a point at which something is not open but closed. When do you think that point is reached? The reason this is important is that one commentator on open education has suggested that content available to anyone on RAND (reasonable and non discriminatory) terms is “open”. I don’t agree. In principle a licence fee renders content closed. In practise RAND is never reasonable and non discriminatory. A charge of 1 USD might be “reasonable” in the United States but would not be in Mozambique where most people live on less than 1 USD a day. Even if the price were lowered for people in Mozambique they would have no means of paying it, since they don’t have access to credit cards or payment mechanisms. If open is to have a global rather than US-centric meaning then the realities of the lives of ordinary people around the world need to be taken into account.

This is not to say that open educational content producers or distributors should not create business models which involve charging for some uses of content, but that in describing the content as open only the royalty free uses can be taken into account. Thus a publisher could licence content for non commercial use, and legitimately describe the content as open, and then charge for commercial uses of the content. The commercial use would be under a different licence and wouldn’t be described as open.

The next issue is that whether a resource is open or not is dependent not only licences but format. A notionally open resource which cannot be easily reproduced, revised, re-mixed and re-distributed cannot be described as open. In this context proprietary formats, which require a re-user to purchase software to use a resource constitute an indirect levy on re-users. This could be considered part of the sliding scale of openness, with a rather a resource which is technically harder to re-use, or in a proprietary format, less open than a resource which is an open format and usable with free tools.

Finally I’d like to hear more on the distinction between re-mix and revise.

The 4R framework is both compelling and speaks the language of educators. This is valuable contribution to our field.

A door is open or shut, so the compelling issue is to think about the minimum criteria to assess when a door is open (as opposed to being shut.) Those of us coming from the free software traditions will argue that the RMSs essential freedoms are the minimum requirement to say that the door is open. When dealing with educational content — this is not as straight forward as the case for software.

Another example in helping us think about these questions is the Free Cultural Works Definition (http://www.freedomdefined.org) which has been adopted by the WMF projects, WikiEdcuator and Creative Commons provide a reference to Free Cultural Works Approved Licenses. As in the case of the Open Source Software Definition — the Free Cultural Works definition does not assume any preference for license or public domain declaration — it focuses on the essential freedoms (or specific interpretations of the 4R framework.)

In the educational context, I think that the nomenclature “open content” is better than “free content”. However this creates confusion or possibly enriches another set of discourse associated with open distance learning, namely the philosophy of open learning which underpins much of the research and theoretical work in distance education. The OER movement would benefit tremendously from reading this cannon of research, particularly the debates giving meaning and depth to the concept of “Open Learning” as published in the distance education literature.

In my view openness is not a debate about copyright, licenses or public domain. These are merely instruments used to implement the underlying values and philosophy of what we’re collectively trying to achieve.