iterating toward openness

Preparing for my out-of-body presentation in Taiwan this week (I’m at home sick - grrr), I kept thinking about the OER space until I actually started visualizing it as a kind of outer space, with little OER bits floating around aimlessly. It was pretty fun to think about until I realized that the primoridal OER soup, the “OER Nebula” is actually being pulled in several directions by several different sources of gravity:

It kind of depressed me thinking the biggest centers of gravity in this space might be licenses. If nothing changes in the space, then billions of internet years from now (in 18 Earth months or so), the space might end up looking like this:

As long as these licenses stay incompatible, interstellar travel between the different worlds will be about the best we can hope for in terms of our remixes. Is this really what we’re doomed to? I think counting on the different licensing bodies to come to harmonization is all but a lost cause (please prove me wrong!). Is it possible to create a stronger center of gravity than the licenses, something that could pull the OERs toward a common place where remixing and sharing the results could be simple and legal?