And we don’t rejoice at CC-BY-NC-ND because fair use is insufficient, while NC is ill-defined and more advantageous for the rich than for workers who need to earn a living from the net combination of their actions.

On the other hand, David’s post is really about tolerance. The real reason for the origin of the term ‘open source’ in software is not really a difference in fundamental philosophy, but a difference in tolerance. Stallman’s extreme view (which I support) and his intolerance around it (which I do not support) caused the schisim between ‘free’ and ‘open’. Much of which we debate in in fact not fundamental philosophy, but the outcome of human intolerance. It would be a great shame for intolerance to continue to underly our work in this area of free and open educational content. I personally don’t like the term ‘open’, and I will continue to use ‘free’, but I am quite happy to tolerate people who use ‘open’ because in the vast majority of cases we are talking about the same thing. My only real desire is that people actually understand their choice of license. Even today, almost everyone I talk to outside of a specific ‘community’ do not understand licenses, and often choose a license for entirely the wrong reason.

Whether we talk about ‘free’ or ‘open’, we need to raise awareness of the impact of license choice.

Regarding the differences between software (apples) and content (expressed as other fruit), sure there are differences. However, we need to realise that in a competitive economy, the cost of a good tends to the marginal cost of production. For both software and content, the marginal cost of producion is effectively zero. Both are non-rivalrous goods as well. Hence, they have a lot more in common than they have different. The only fundamental difference between them is in their error tolerance, but other than fatal errors, even that difference may not be as great as we think.

To be fair “open” and “free” are different concepts. To quote Derek Keats “To be free it must be open, but it can be open without being Free” (http://cnx.org/content/m19865/latest/) — and agreed this is a values-based position. The cornerstone of modern democracies lies in freedom — a First Amendment value.

Thanks for this post, David.

d.

Now, I would point out that your definition is not inclusive of CC BY-NC-ND, or at least, it provides measures of “openness” that finds CC BY-NC-ND wanting (because of ND and NC). A truly inclusive definition of open content cannot specify remix as an attribute. That would have to be saved for a best practices type statement on choosing an open content license.

Moreover, your definition could also be improved if it did not privilege the “almost PD”/BSD/CC-BY licensing model over copyleft/GPL/CC-SA (from this perspective, OKD is better at defining open content). Choosing which of these two license models to use is a rhetorical choice based in part on fundamentally different beliefs in how to create knowledge for the public commons. And I would argue that we could theorize all month about which is better, but it would be impossible to prove in general, for the whole OER movement, which is the best to use for every context.

I’ve recently been trying to imagine a method to cite/link open documents that aren’t necessarily accessible at one URL but are distributed. Using a restrictive license flag like ND doesn’t wipe out fair use rights here in the US, and the ability to distribute content enhances the ability to quote limited sections, etc.

People simply understanding copyright well enough to consider which rights they want to keep and share is a huge improvement over the status quo. Good post.