At the OSS Watch conference in April last year, I took photos of some of the speakers and activities and uploaded them to flickr, under a creative commons licence. Yesterday my photo of Glyn Moody taken at the event was taken from there to illustrate his Wikipedia entry.
It’s not the best portrait in the world. The composition, lighting and resolution could all be improved. But it was good enough, and when I uploaded it to flickr, I tagged it with who was it in, so it was easy enough to find.
These two factors, good enough and easy enough to find; are key to content reuse. They’re also key to open source: software has to be good enough to convey a distinguishing characteristic and clear enough in describing the distinguishing characteristic for those who need that characteristic to find in via their favourite search engine.
In this case the distinguishing characteristic required was a picture that was clearly of Glyn and which represented him fairly and honestly, and the photo, for all its faults, is clearly of him and is a fair and honest representation. My choice of creative commons for flickr photos is was a no-brainer for me, but not for all flickr users: of more than half a billion photos, only tens of millions are licensed under the creative commons.
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